


Brontide

by blesser



Series: Wise Blood [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domesticity, F/F, Haunted Houses, Heatwave, Hurt/Comfort, Murder Trials, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, The Southern Gothic Relocation AU, homebuilding, post digestivo, renovation, trauma aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-08-12 21:19:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7949554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blesser/pseuds/blesser
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If anything, this place is a cradle, the start of something,” Alana pushes impossibly closer, “A new life for us and not just the end of the old ones, you can feel that can’t you?"</p><p>They haven’t spoken yet about the future, what it is exactly they are trying to do here. It isn’t the time now either, with the both of them enjoying this first real night of sleep, both too hot and too close and just too raw for that conversation.</p><p>“I suppose,” Margot says wryly, “we aren’t either of us strangers to resurrection.” </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>  <em>Names need clearing, scars need healing and a home needs building. Margot and Alana set to work putting down new roots with a storm on the horizon.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This Is as Good a Place to Fall as Any (We'll Build Our Altar Here)

**Author's Note:**

> Brontide (n) - The low rumble of distant thunder.
> 
> ***
> 
> Title from Bedroom Hymns by Florence & The Machine

JULY FIFTEENTH // SAVANNAH, GA // EIGHTY DEGREES

Biting the proverbial bullet and dragging themselves out of this honeymoon trance of blissful domesticity is actually much easier than imagined.

One morning Alana wakes on the floor of the parlour with just a thin sheet and Margot’s body wrapped tight around her. She feels calm and focused. Managing to turn in the slack tangle of arms around her, Alana reaches to brush hair from Margot’s face and kisses her awake.

Predictably, Margot protests the whole ordeal with sweet, grumpy sounds that make Alana concede and leave her be.

It is so hot in the room that the floor and the sheet and their _very skin_ seem to be sticking them to each other and to the house itself. Alana; now entirely disentangled and grudgingly pulling on a shirt moves creakily through the ground floor of the house.

She approaches the tall, ancient chiller on a quest for ice like a woman in a desert reaching for an oasis mirage.

Victorious and mildly cooler, at least for a little while, she returns to the parlour and takes in the anticipated sight of Margot, stretched back out into her abandoned space and breathing slowly and deeply once more. There is a little furrow between her eyebrows, her face is pushed half into the sheets and she whistles a little on the exhale. It is peacefully inviting enough to make Alana sway where she stands, as hot and as drowsy as she is.

Meanly and playfully, Alana pads barefoot on the hardwood and presses her freezing glass of juice to an exposed patch of Margot’s skin where the sheet is ridden up.

Even asleep and vulnerable in the middle of the floor, Margot manages to exude her usual brand of unshakeability. Alana watches her often and considers how her cool control and wealthy, old-worldliness appears from the outside, with all of her arched eyebrow aloofness and classically sharp features which mark her as the perfect noir-esque housewife or a Hitchcock killer.

_A vision in a sweetheart dress with a bloodied rolling pin clutched behind her back._

Expecting cool Margot Verger to show outward signs of surprise is like trying to get a rise from a sculpture. Alana knows this well and takes what is probably an unhealthy and unrecommended kind of satisfaction from witnessing and crafting changes and nuances to the marble. Old habits indeed die hard for Alana, a seasoned watcher and professional, methodical note-taker.

Over their time together, she has watched as Margot has crumbled down so low she seemed irreparable but also in blinding contrast watched her rise as the deserving, triumphant victor.

 Ablaze with their own conquering.

A savage, protective thing.

Now, at the touch of cool glass to her overheated, sleepy skin Margot’s green eyes open slowly but are instantly alert. She has the look of a spooked cat for all of about three seconds before Alana follows up the touch of the glass with a soft kiss.

Margot sighs deeply into the touch.

The surprise of waking on the hard, hot floor is instantly apparent and the precarious dance between sleep and safety is visible in Margot’s eyes before the shock follows up with a search for recognition and finally the wave of calm at what she sees. Alana smiles widely and easily at the realisation that this last part is because of Margot looking at her.

“It’s time.”

A particularly raspy and displeased groan.

“It’s a Sunday.”

“So?”

“So it is not _time_ for anything. It is a Sunday and therefore time does not exist as a concept.”

Margot attempts to enforce her illogical statement by burying her head in the pillows before realising that she is unfortunately on a makeshift nest on the floor which consists of a rug, a lumpy draft excluder and a dust sheet.

“I’m not talking about getting dolled up to pray and lie in church Margot. Today is in fact _perfect_ ,” Alana says perched up on the arm of a covered armchair, “because there will be no traffic on the road and even less in the air on a Sunday and I want this to be a quick, painless, in-and-out kind of excursion.”

“To church?”

“To clear our names.”

“For lying about praying?”

“For _murder_.”

“Ah, yes,” A magnificent eye roll, “that old thing.”

Margot pulls herself up against the lumpy edge of the chair and drains Alana’s glass of juice in about ten seconds flat.

“Christ,” Margot mutters as she adds theft and blasphemy to her sin count and sets aside the empty glass. She smacks her lips and Alana wants to find it irritating but finds it is really only irritatingly endearing, “It is hot as hell in here. Is it everywhere or just this room?”

“I don’t think it’s a localised phenomenon. But if you would like to wear nothing but a sheet all day to test your theory, I would have to tell you I approve highly of that kind of standardised research method.”

Margot stands gracefully but abruptly and lets the sheet pool at her feet. She is eerily placed exactly in the white patch of light let in by the high-up, broken shutters. Her toenails are painted a shining mother of pearl gold and that is just about the sum entire of what she is left wearing.

 Nail polish and her little smirk.

Alana gets a good view of the marks left from the floorboards on her bare, tanned body. She likes the little crease under Margot’s left eye where she had stubbornly mashed her face back into the sheets before.

Never one to hide, Margot lets herself be looked at for a long moment before crossing to the stairs _-presumably in search of some clothes-_ the oversized paint shirts they had torn off of each other the night before have been lost to the slowly devouring mess of the room and probably won’t resurface any time soon.

Alana remembers the smell of turpentine _and sweet tea, elderflower on Margot’s breath and the fingers like creeping vines working under her shirt and her skin…_ hissing through her teeth, Alana, presses a paint stained fist to her temples and wills away the beginning of a headache blooming on the inside of her skull. Her head beats in time with Margot’s feet pounding on the stairs. She lets a minute pass with her eyes tracking the paint marks on the wall opposite, how many more coats to cover it all. Two? Three?

“I really can’t wear that old thing to church; I would be the laughing stock of the town!” Margot calls down the stairs with fake alarm, voice shrill with effected scandal.

Alana tracks the sound of her voice and the creak of a floorboard overhead to one of the upstairs internal rooms, slightly disorientated as she is still getting to grips with the floor plan of the house. As she replies she wonders if her voice will carry loud enough to be heard through the ship-like creaks of the house shifting in the heat.

“How so?”

There is no immediate answer. Alana waits, cursing aloud as she tries to take a sip from the empty glass when suddenly Margot reappears on the staircase. She descends like Scarlet O’Hara having dressed fast, smart but comfortable in light cool colours, dress cinched at her tiny waist and hair pulled up quick from her face.

Just looking at her is almost enough to relieve the heat and Alana might be dying of thirst but the sight has her feeling impossibly refreshed.

“It has a stain,” explains Margot, pouting and lash-battering believably as she pulls on short lace gloves that only add to this woe-is-me good girl act.

The entire get-up would be far too on the nose and ridiculous if it was anyone but Margot, who seems to be able to embody whichever part is needed. Now: this believable and soft hearted ingénue, the humbling morning little sister with pure white gloves and heart.

Alana glances away from her at last and down at the heap of sheet in question by her feet which does indeed have a stain, a dark red spatter of a mess that drives her mind instantly to a series of images: _blood pooling stickily under a door, mopping up hand-beaten steak juices with fresh bread, white lab walls lined with pages and pages and pages of photographs, each a mosaic piece of violent, casual bloodshed._

She kicks the sheet under the nearest flat surface.

“You know we aren’t really going to church right?” Alana is dazed, from the heat and from everything in her head and this makes her frown at the wholesome but still flashy pearl earrings Margot is fastening, clasp held carefully between her teeth.

Margot almost does look disappointed and bizarrely Alana wonders if one of those new, big boxes in the house perhaps holds a fabulous hat for just such a Sunday morning. Another, more regular, Sunday morning with more lazy sex in bed and breakfast and definitely, _Oh please_ , God, less murder investigation.

“Well fine,” Margot laughs like herself again, “but you do know how much I like to start my Sunday with a reminder of my sins and dwindling mortality.”

“And here I was, thinking you just liked to start your Sunday with wine.”

“Same difference.”

Margot fiddles absently, doing up her shirt cuffs. She looks… thoughtfully serious and downturns her eyes, tackling a stubborn button in silence. Eventually she speaks, softly and plainly.

“Stop lounging about on the furniture and looking tempting,” Margot says, not looking up from her sleeve, “we should get on the road, you are right.”

Alana releases her breath in a contented sigh.

“No change there then, let us hope I can keep that up for this hearing, or at least for the inevitable collision with Jack Crawford.”

“Huh, maybe I will take my first choice of outfit then, just in case we need a white flag to wave.”

“Aptly blood stained,” Alana sighs.

“Paint dear, not blood, I am fairly sure,” Margot squints up into the dark corners of the high ceiling, looking for traces of the offending red paint, “You didn’t scratch me that deep last night.”

Alana grins, warm and pleased at the mention of the memory, leaning to run her foot absently up Margot’s bare calf.

“Speaking of which-“ Margot falters at Alana’s raised eyebrow, “-not _that,_ the paint. How do you feel about mustard accents, maybe in the bedroom?”

“Depends,” Alana says casually, picking up a few scattered cushions in search of her handbag, “how do you feel about sleeping alone?”

“Positively horrified.”

“Well, then at least I am doing something right.”

“You do lots of things right Alana -most things actually- it is quite terrifying, or it would be if I didn’t love it so much. Although perhaps planning romantic weekend getaways might not be one of those things… Now,” she holds up her phone and waggles it, “how many of my lawyers should I be calling for this?”

 

*

 

They call all of the lawyers.

As a precautionary measure of course, but when she points out that nothing says guilty like an army of lawyers, Alana tries to persuade Margot that they have very much earned the right to appear and in fact actually _be_ paranoid.

As they wait in the boarding line at the very muggy Atlanta airport, Alana continues her one woman mission of blustery positivity, which almost convinces both of them, saying quiet but firm that there is no way Jack Crawford is going to arrest them on sight.

They are answering a court summons as witnesses after all, albeit a little late and having suspiciously left no forwarding address or reachable number.

This isn’t some kind of self-surrender.

Alana can’t bring herself to watch out of the window while they are in the air, can’t think about the small piece of sanctuary they deserved so much shrink away out of sight, even for just a few days.

Instead with a little convincing and a lot of sweet talk, she leans into Margot’s seat with her back to the view and they strategize together. It is decided that Alana will go to the preliminary hearing alone and Margot will spend the day getting things together, carrying on north and tying up the loose ends at Muskrat farm and most importantly actually packing for them; living out of a suitcase loses its romance after about a month.

They land in DC too early for anywhere serving good food to be open so they stroll through the airport with that dream-like, apocalypse feeling, hand in hand.

Alana had had the forethought to pick out what is arguably their least creased blouse and ducks into a cheap customs convenience store bathroom to change. She purchases strong, unsweetened coffee for the both of them from a machine, packaged pastries and a horribly, hilariously named lipstick which Margot puts on her in the taxi rank while they wait.

Margot applies the lipstick with ritualistic precision and then ruins the careful aesthetic entirely by kissing her hard and filthy out on the street, a hand fisted in the front of her blouse and tongue in her mouth. Alana stumbles into her, lacking grace but smiling heart-felt into the kiss, Margot seems to be _breathing_ reassurance into her.

They part ways, breathless and pink cheeked and Alana uneasily watching as the car takes Margot away, back to _that place_. She breathes very carefully, determined not to acknowledge the butterflies threatening to let loose inside of her.

When she is settled enough, Alana hails the next cab and on the short drive is pleased to have had the forethought to throw a book into her bag on the way out of the house. She thinks what she needs is the distraction although soon tires of the way her unfocused eyes trip up over the words and her thoughts race away from the book entirely.

 Instead she rummages in her purse for a compact mirror and checks her lipstick, feeling the ghostly, heavenly remains of Margot’s kiss under her fingertips. She lets the feeling calm her mind and passes the rest of the drive silently, watching for the courthouse to appear out the window.

*

“I was Mr Verger’s psychiatrist and am therefore both professionally compelled, as well as ethically obliged to refuse any further questioning on the subject,” Alana repeats.

A frustrated silence fills the room until it seems to be a tangible thing, crawling across the stand, the chairs and into their ears.

 In the end, the six representatives who have arrived from the Verger legal arsenal look a bit ridiculous paired with the skeleton staff the Department of Justice have managed to rustle up last minute on a Sunday. In fact, from the looks of some of the staff, they were called out of their beds. One girl even arriving so late and clutching a coffee and tablet under her arm, she still had shower damp hair running tracks down her blouse.

Alana can see Jack Crawford sat in a chair just off to her left, half blocked out of sight by a couple of the Verger suits flocking her and some yawning, faceless FBI suits, including the flustered young woman with the ever frizzing hair who has her hands poised over her tablet like a pianist frozen in time. The stenographer, Alana realises, finding at first the lack of the familiar keyboard clacking off putting. However as the silence grows she is grateful for its absence of noise in the room as it allows her the dramatic, meaningful pauses that are a victory.

The room stays quiet and she keeps her gaze at a level middle distance and doesn’t shift in her seat or blink too much. She knows the drill, has been on the other side often enough to know what they are looking for. Alana is carefully, casually and perhaps childishly keeping her lawyers between her light of sight to Jack. Unfortunately she can’t dream of blocking out Kade Purnell though, who is directly opposite Alana and burning a hole in everyone’s retinas with a shockingly electric blue suit. Alana is quiet envious of it until she thinks of her new life, the heat of Savannah, Margot’s hands holding steady on her hips as Alana leans precariously on a ladder.

Days spent untangling creeping ivy from attic shutters don’t pair well with a killer pantsuit.

Kade tugs at her collar in what is probably a deliberate, poker move rather than an actual tic and looks like she could be reading Alana’s mind, unnerving.

“May I take this interlude in the proceedings to say thank you Doctor Bloom for your…” Kade pauses and narrows her eyes, predatorily, “… _invaluable insight._ I must say we are rather surprised but nonetheless appreciative of you taking the time, especially on this day of rest, to travel all the way here from?” She leans even further forward across the desk like she can tilt herself right into Alana’s brain and rummage around herself to save time.

“Home,” Alana provides coolly.

“Right.”

Jack, up until now totally silent and as unmoving as a very weary looking gargoyle, let’s a long harsh whistle of breath escape him. Deflated balloon wouldn’t be a charitable comparison, but an accurate one.

“We can appreciate the ethical boundaries you need to be wary of here,” he pauses uncharacteristically and when he speaks again his voice is softer, “your professionalism is not on trial here.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware that any part of me was on trial? It was my understanding that this was a post-trial inquest into the very solved murder of Mr Verger? ‘Box ticking statements and formalities’ was the lie, _sorry_ , the line that got me here,” Alana tilts her head, innocently bird-like and at the same time intentionally sardonic.

“It is difficult to _entirely_ solve a murder with the perpetrator on the run as you can imagine. What we need is a guarantee that you are cooperating to the best of your abilities within the limitations here.”

She makes a face.

“How exactly does one act to the best of their abilities when acting within limitations?”

“I think you are well aware that your abilities are some of the best Doctor. Or at least, you’ve never needed your ego stroked to help us before.”

“And it doesn’t need it now thank you,” Alana prickles, trying to keep her voice even as she continues, “Look I can cooperate as much or as little as I can in the circumstances, the _limitations_ , but the fact of the matter is that I am both professionally compelled and-“

“Ethically obliged to refuse any further questioning on the subject,” All of the suits groan in unison like a stuffy, bored looking and besuited choir.

 Kade Purnell smiles not so nicely.

Jack looks like he simultaneously wants to jump up out of his chair but at the same time let it pull him down into the ground; the resulting slouch is quite uncomfortable to look at. Alana has never enjoyed witnessing discomfort from anyone, has in fact historically gone out of her way to prevent it.

Seeing Jack Crawford crumbling is one of the more shockingly unpleasant things on an endless list of sights that she wishes she could un-see. Alana lowers her eyes and ponders her position.

“I can’t guarantee you that,” She says clearly and steadily, “I can’t guarantee you anything.”

“Well what can you give me? Because I need it to be something, Alana, please.”

Jack sounds small and hopeless and very un-Jack-like. As Alana looks down at her hands she is seeing them handing him a wedding dress intended for a funeral while he stands an arms width away with a sea of grief between them _… or how he slouches a little like now, defeated, half a room away and unreachable in a hospital gown matching her own and a fresh bandage on his neck, snoring in time to the hospital machinery all beeping around her, pressing blue gloved hands to his eyes and turning away from the stench of blood and death in the lab, turning back to her and nodding across a lecture hall with faith and approval on his face…_

All this history cut open, so vulnerable to sentiment and here is Alana, irrevocably changed by it all and about to smash it into a thousand pieces like a toy outgrown by a child.

“Eighty percent.”

“What?”

“Do you remember when we first talked like this? Go ahead and unravel it back to the very start, if you can, to the first _guarantee_ you made me. This was back when haggling over people’s lives and sanity was something we did on lunch breaks. You said you could promise me eighty percent,” Alana chuckles mirthlessly, “I was so naïve and cocky about those odds so I trusted you. Well, since then we’ve both become uncomfortably familiar with the other twenty. I figure I owe you a return on that, since that figure worked out for us so well last time. I know it sure was a wild ride for me, Jesus Christ, why don’t you ask Will how effective our eighty percent guarantee protection was? Or Beverly, or Abigail Hobbs?”

Before, before she had a spine that was literally reinforced with steel and had felt the life drain out of a person under her hands, Alana might’ve felt the usual crashing wave of tears all hot and vengeful which would accompany this kind of outburst.

Or more recently, screaming from the confines of a hospital bed, the aching numbness that her trapped, wounded animal anger brought forth. Right now though? Now she feels pretty good as she stalks past the still seated and dazed officials and sweeps from the room without a backwards glance.

Later _-approximately ten seconds after the courthouse door creaks shut-_ she will feel alarmed to realize what exactly it was that had taken a hold of her, what makes her break Jack down just that little bit further so she can trample over him on the way out, storming past a furious Purnell and her own unsure lawyers, the slow agents and the stenographer, fingers comically hovering over the record.

This strange and vicious emotion that claws away inside her.

_Spite_

It is as uncomfortable as it is unavoidable and stays with her, ugly and present, all the way out of the courthouse and sits next to her in the back of the cab, through the motel elevator ride and into the room.

Spite makes Alana push Margot away _-with gentle, sad hands_ \- in the shower.

They are crushed to each other out of warmth and necessity in the world’s tightest bathroom, in a hotel room which seems freezing cold despite the time of year.

When Alana had entered the room with a face and heart like thunder, Margot was already sprawled on the bed with full cases and the mini bar in pieces around her - _a tableau of beauty and weary travellers misery_ \- Margot took one look at Alana’s blank face and without words had bossed her into the shower.

Letting these guilty hands push her back an impossible step in the small space Margot relents and sighs softly, serving only to make Alana feel all the more wretched and awful. She lets the steam wash over her and tries to unknot some of the tension in her shoulders with the weak pressure of the water. Apparently outskirt DC motels have the water pressure of a leaking cabin in a light drizzle.

 A ghosting touch to her top lip makes Alana jump and her eyes fly open to see Margot very close, her own eyes very wide and open and a very pretty green. She is touching a clean but scratchy flannel to Alana’s face, cleverly not actually touching her skin to skin at all. Margot has a mastery of navigating loopholes.

This is how they understand and traverse life with one another, how they revolve on the unpredictable axis which ricochets from occasional prickly, withdrawn snappiness to a sudden unwillingness to go untouched for even a second, _don’t ever stop touching me_ , usually ending with them curled up and around, around, around as interlocked and defensive as a nest of rattlers.

“Not bad for a dollar,” Margot is chuckling as she works, a musical sound half hidden by the beat of the water.

Alana’s lips open with an obedient pop, she lets Margot slide a slow hand around her nape and tilt her head so she can scrub a little to get the cheap lipstick off. It had remained all day, a harsh red slash of a victory smile in the courthouse which had slipped and transformed into a downturned statement of sadness on the way to the motel.

“Clean,” Margot declares, which is so far from how Alana is feeling right now that she lets a laugh-sob sort of noise escape her.

Alana shakes, maybe tears or maybe just water from her eyes and looks at Margot and the close, satisfied tilt to her lips and still outstretched hands. Her surprisingly short boyish fingernails have flecks of what is unmistakeably base coat white under them, the very paint which should have finished drying its second coat on the walls of the messy parlour with the sheets on the floor and the broken shutters. It is such a tangible link to home - _their home-_ and such a great comfort that Alana is unable to stop herself softening and pushing forward automatic, needy, just to kiss her.

They hear the flannel hit the tile and Alana moves her head, manoeuvres them impossibly out of the spray of the water and deepens the kiss. Margot brings both hands up to touch her jaw, her throat, her shoulders.

Frantic and unrestrained, just doing what damn well feels good for once, Alana moves her way down the wet and shivering slide of Margot’s body till her knees hit the tile and she reaches forward to brace herself against the shockingly cold glass of the door. Margot pets at her hair, gets Alana sighing with more than just a hint of nails to her scalp.

Alana looks down at the floor of the shower, at the unmissable flannel beside her knee which is so bright white against the colourless tile and clear water. The violent streaks of red on the material are so shocking that she blinks as though it is the first time she has seen colour.

Spellbound, Alana is unable to tear her eyes away from it even as she puts her teeth to the silk soft skin at Margot’s hip, her inner thigh. She encourages Margot’s hands to twist further into her hair, just to feel again the blunt nails and the paint under them against her body. Alana tries to imagine the crescent marks leaving evidence traces of home under her very skin as Margot gets louder, grip tighter but less sure or controlled.

The lipstick continues to spiral its way towards the plughole, the sight unbearably matched with the delight of Margot’s body responding so beautifully. Alana tries closing her eyes, losing herself to the sure feel of flesh and bone before her, under her fingertips and her tongue. She pushes for that same musically rough, low laugh-like sound she seems able to create.

And still, as Margot starts to fray and shake and pull at Alana’s hair and shoulders with unapologetic fervour, the image is burnt into the back of Alana’s eyelids; the punch of _Caught Red Handed_ swirling around her knees against the stark white tiles and escaping to the drain but never dissipating.

The one thought, the one batter-ramming away against the inside of Alana’s skull as her vision goes red:

 _God, which_ _one of us is bleeding?_


	2. Make Me Your Maria (I'm Already On My Knees)

JULY SIXTEENTH // WASHINGTON D.C // SIXTY DEGREES

 

The night passes with quiet touches and both of them drifting in and out of easy, sated sleep. Alana wakes in the arms of the person she loves, breakfasts on a small mountain of sugary pastries and starts the day ready to save herself, to save Margot. _By any means necessary_ isn’t a phrase she would’ve uttered before she stepped into the stables of Muskrat Farm, but now it serves as a sort of _till death do us part_ alternative for them.

Alana never would have dreamed that watching someone wipe pink powdered sugar off the end of their nose would make her heart swell with such violent protectiveness, but here they are.

Feeling utterly redetermined and more grounded, they return together to the courthouse to finish this once and for all. Their hands find each other with an easy grip as they climb the steps. Margot has lost the lacy gloves she had worn up from Savannah, left them behind in the room along with any pretences and innocent niceties. Today she dresses to kill but emotes so beautifully when she is called upon, letting her face soften and eyes well up just on the appropriate side of dismayed. She never loses it though, keeps admirably level headed in the eyes of the officials given the weighty implications skirting her and of course the tragic circumstances surrounding the situation.

Kade Purnell seems floored by Margot, maybe it’s just the better, more striking figure she cuts in her suit or maybe it’s the whole performance but the Deputy Assistant Attorney seems off her game today. The reason becomes apparent when Purnell starts brandishing a freshly opened letter and an edge of hysteria creeps its way into her voice. She is holding the envelope between gloved forefinger and thumb so it must have arrived in the morning post and they haven’t made any developments on trace analysis.

 _Good luck with that one Jimmy,_ Alana recognises that elegant hand on the letter like it’s a shout across the courtroom, _finally made it through on your side of the deal then,_ she thinks _, just in the nick of time to save our asses and as always with the flare of the dramatic. Last minute salvation like some benevolent God, is that it?_

Margot remains poised on the stand and doesn’t miss a beat with the new development, continues to deliver every line so wonderfully. As Purnell reads the letter aloud Margot even ducks her head with sad disbelief and shoots Alana an honest to god wink. Alana wants to feel dismayed and anxious but is surprised to find she just can’t quite get there, she feels morally skewed by the whole affair and knows that there is a conversation to be had here, with both herself and with Margot. She stores it away for another time, instead hiding a half smile into her paper cup of water.

Afterwards, after they are officially thanked, excused and dismissed, Margot goes to fetch the car while Alana puts the last signature on their statement. They aren’t exactly waiting around for the murder trial after party or small talk. Neither of them wish to spend a minute longer here than necessary and as Alana heads for the exit and the freeing daylight beyond she is enjoying the quick, crack of her heels on the grey marble so much, each step sounding like the starter pistol, that she is having to physically stop herself from breaking into a gleeful dash for freedom.

“He promised to kill you, you know,” eerily, Jack seems to materialise out of the water cooler just to be able to cut her off. He looks more resigned than pissed and Alana feels such a surge of genuine and upsetting sympathy for him, for all the work ahead of him and all the work behind that must be dragging him down with its teeth and claws in his poor scarred neck.

They are stopped outside the grand room where Will’s judgement happened, where Abigail Hobbs was projected, smiling and alive onto the wall, where blind justice was found swinging from the rafters. This awkward iony isn’t lost on either of them, the door is open and they both spare a wary glance into it. Alana sees a dead girl’s beatific smile and a severed ear tumbling onto the floor. She shakes herself to pull away from the room, the past and back to Jack, smiling tightly.

“He also promised –one morning in bed- that he would send me a real phrenology bust and not the ‘frightfully inaccurate gift shop excuse of one’ that I kept on my desk,” Alana is secretly pleased to see discomfort flicker across Jack’s features, “I guess we’ll see which promise he fulfils first won’t we?”

“You mean which suits his agenda first? He isn’t exactly a man of his word.”

“Oh, but, that there Jack? _That_ is your mistake, maybe even your downfall,” Alana takes a closer step and Jack, to his credit, holds his ground, “But yes, absolutely, I imagine it is a lot easier to Fedex somebody a ceramic bust than it is to track down their change in address and kill them, even for him. Especially for him," she pauses, flicking invisible lintoff her sleeve, "I mean, right now at least.”

Jack shifts restlessly and in looking more desperate he looks more like his old self, eyes alive with the hunt. Seeing him riled up but familiar at least is almost a relief.

“What do you mean by that exactly Doctor Bloom?”

“Let’s just say I have a pretty good understanding of an… influential party,” Alana lowers her voice as people spill from the hearing room and pass them in a frustrated flurry like excited bees, Kade Purnell giving Jack a look which might burn the skin of a lesser man, but he just rocks on his heels seemingly unphased as Alana waits to speak again, “It’s an understanding I’m not sure you yourself ever really managed to establish Jack, but it is safe to say that Hannibal Lecter won’t be ringing my doorbell anytime soon. Far too busy.”

In a stubborn display of 'not missing a beat' Jack nods uncomprehendingly, eyes narrowed.

“Doorbell huh, not a knocker?” he says, eyes smiling without his permission in a way that tells Alana he is processing her information without acknowledging it, “any other details you want to share, in case I need to get in touch? You did mention a change of address but I can’t say I received a card in the post.”

Alana returns his forgery of a smile, is alarmed how easy it is.

“Shame,” she says, “perhaps it got muddled in with all the other post you’ve received recently, house warming invites probably take the back burner for murder confessions.”

Jack receives a not entirely unfriendly nod, the best Alana can do when she is thrumming with flight instinct, and then she is walking away. She stops on the top step as the light from outside hits the tips of her shoes.

_Click your heels three times._

She starts moving back towards Jack.

 _There’s no place_ _like home._

As she turns she is turning back towards the last four years of her life. Every bloody, heart-pounding moment unfurls between herself and Jack like individual strings of life support. Alana wants to cut each and every one to sever it all, burn it, just as much as she wants to wrap them carefully and keep them forever.

“I had a choice you know, that night in Baltimore: Be blind or be brave,” she clears her throat with a painful gulp, “I can see with hindsight that it was a trapped choice, a lose-lose seeing that blindness got me into that kitchen and bravery got me pushed out the window. So I am done. I am done adhering to ultimatums Jack. His, yours, theirs,” Alana flourishes her hands angrily, “I’ve made what might be the stupid and difficult decision to live, and love, as blindly and as bravely as possible. At the same time as diving in with eyes wide open perhaps I am being cowardly selfish, who knows and frankly who cares? It is all on my terms. _Mine_.”

Jack smiles like he might actually get it but he doesn’t look at her though, is instead staring up towards the courthouse ceiling and its coloured glass, or maybe higher. _God help him indeed_. The sight of blood pooling under a door as it rattles on its hinges appears before her and fades back to Jack, his head tipped back and his hands in his pocket with all his blood safely inside of him. Alana shakes what she hopes will be the last of these horrible thoughts and walks away quickly, for real, for the last time. 

Alana emerges into the bright white glare of the steps and takes them one at a time, almost physically feeling the strings pulling taught and snapping with each step. Margot waits for her, mounted facetiously on the curb with the window rolled down and the radio blaring. Alana can’t help but feel like a teenager storming out of the house and into her inappropriate girlfriend’s car.

Margot unbelievably calls out to her when Alana is in earshot in a husky drawl, eyes raking Alana’s body over the edge of her aviators.

“Hey hot stuff,” she grins like a wolf and drums her nails on the blazing red roof of the car, “you look like you could use a ride.”

*

“Pull over here,” Alana says suddenly.

They are on the highway, almost dead half way between Atlanta and Savannah, both tired from the case and the flight but blood thrumming with their freedom and all the possibilities unfurling ahead.

“Oh yes please,” Margot says, as she squints at the passing sign and then donuts the car into the dusty lot like a get-away driver.

They weave their way separately along the aisles and bins of junk and treasure, Margot runs her hands along trailing leaves of spider plants and hums happily under her breath. Alana moves with purpose past homemade chandeliers made from cutlery, inexplicably creepy jars of doll heads, tarnished jewellery, old fashioned bicycles and boxes of old 50 cent paperbacks, she approaches the toothless old woman who seems to be manning the yard sale from a high hammock on the porch of a surprisingly nice house.

They return to the car twenty minutes later, Margot has to tie open the boot of the Tesla and has her arms full of sturdy rope she has cleverly used to accommodate the grandfather clock that plays a tinny, music-box refrain of Gloomy Sunday when it chimes. She adds a black Misiak tea set, rattling about on its tray and three dangerous looking plants which will be sure to trail out behind them on the road. _Creepy, strangling streamers._

“You should see the back of the car, it looks like it’s an Adams Family style, Just Married drive home for us,” Margot says gleefully, linking their fingers over the stick, "find any treasure?”

Alana unwraps the object from a yellow newspaper dated fifty years ago –RECENT ATTACKS ANIMAL SHERRIF SAYS- her purchase glints in the light as she places it on the dashboard. Margot makes a sound of awed approval.

“Hmm, creepy,” she says, “I like it.”

The door knocker rolls on the dash as Margot takes a sharp bend and Alana lets the momentum drop it down into her lap. It is a huge, sturdy thing, brassy gold and shaped like a wolf, it's teeth closed around a hoofed leg and eyes narrowed defensively. Alana taps her fingers on it to the radio all the way home and tells herself over and over that superstition is just a defence mechanism against coincidence.

 

JULY TWENTY FOURTH// SAVANNAH, GA // EIGHTY NINE DEGREES

 

From then on, time unfolds for them in a heady slide of freedom, aided in its spirit-lifting blissfulness by a long summer heat surge and the knowledge of really – _actually_ \- getting away with murder.

Alana never imagined that a shared, deathly secret and the intoxicating closeness it brings would be the thing she would look for in her eventual, be-all-end-all relationship. In the same way she had always considered herself too curious and heart-wild to settle for out and out domesticity at all. Apparently, both eventualities simultaneously was just what she would be ending up with and so far there hasn’t been a single moment, not the monotonous routine of day to day nor those heart pounding, reaching across the bed night terrors which have given her pause for thought.

Margot, herself forever scheming her way forward and yet inwardly shying away from the bleak alternatives her future always seemed to hold, is surprised daily by her luck. Or, perhaps, luck wasn’t the right word to describe finding somebody who would hold your hand in one of theirs while the other held the devils writhing head under the water for you.

Nonetheless, they make each other increasingly and impossibly happy. They grow acclimatised to one other’s moods and routines, surrendering to the downward fall, the slip-slide of closeness. This novel sense of peace makes them giddy.

Routinely, as far as a routine goes for them, the nights inevitably end with long conversations to the stars; curled up and tipped skywards on the porch swing. Both of them feeling dizzy with the vastness, the closeness and the whisky and gingers.

Days are dedicated to manual labour of the homemaking variety, they pick through boxes of yellowed paper and dust-caked bureaus and they wear themselves out with this excavating. They will eat on the floor where they drop, haphazard and slapdash meals picked up and thrown together from the mostly deserted, swelteringly hot market store two blocks over.

More often than not, with the food settling and the heat of the night creeping in, as Margot licks the drops left from dinner from her fingers; the oily focaccia, the rum sauce, the fresh fruit that they pick away at; Alana will move with a heated approach, eyes very dark. Margot will squeal in delight as she is gentled down to the floor and the boards start up an accompanying percussion of creaks and groans.

The house is noisy and stubborn in this way as it changes, bends and creaks to accommodate them, slowly and achingly with growing pains which include; painted shut windows, sticky locks on almost every door, an ancient and unpredictable wiring system and plumbing which seems personally out to get them.

They have just experienced a week of blissfully cold showers that turned scolding hot in an instant by these rebel pipes. When Alana foolishly declared war on the plumbing and retaliated with a bad attitude and a wrench, a full dry day followed without a single sign of life from any tap.

“This house is alive,” Margot declares, taking a long swig from one of the thousands of bottles of water which now fill the cellar, “it is a monster house trying to repel us.”

They stand in the upstairs dining room (the nice one) like children stuck in the mud, barefoot and frozen in place surrounded by a dusty but beautiful chandelier. The fixture lays in pieces after a house shaking plummet from the ceiling when a door slammed inexplicably downstairs. Margot passes Alana the bottle wordlessly and bends down to pick up a big shard of green-blueish glass which she holds up to let light throw a rainbow onto the dining table.

“I love it,” She says, wide eyed.

Whether she is referring to the broken light or the monster house, Alana can’t be sure, but regardless they are living in a determined, fragile coexistence within these walls and vocalising their content can't hurt in the appeasement with the house.

The broken glass gets painstakingly gathered up over the morning and by dinner -steamed fish and jasmine rice eaten at a rickety table in the small garden- Margot has worked her magic. She sweeps a great arc of cement just inside the entrance hall, a sloppy sweep from the heavy front door almost to the parlour entrance.

When this part of the job is done, Margot pulls Alana down beside her on the floor and they crouch together and spend the day talking quietly and carefully whilst pressing the glass down. The final work is a curve of a fragmented mosaic imbedded in the floor, from which light reflects and colour throws itself onto the house as a result when the door opens.

It makes Alana’s skin itch when she first looks at it to see all that broken glass.

A few hours later; comfortably full of dinner, warm from the evening heat of the garden and eyelids heavy with white wine, she stops with her hand on the bottom of the banister. Considering. Her wobbly legs win out over her brain and decide to lay her body down on the floor, the flimsy material of her white sundress letting her feel the cold glass against her flushed skin. She stretches out against the pleasant shock, supresses a yawn and a shiver.

A noise alerts Alana that Margot has followed her in from the garden, quietly she leans in the shadow against the front door and looks down at her.

“Beautiful,” Margot says, awed and fond.

Alana automatically arches against the mosaic with a clear peel of laughter.

“Do I look like an angel,” she teases, “with broken wings?”

“You look like a crazy drunk person, writhing around on the floor, but I really, really love you," a breath and a beat, "and that’s pretty beautiful to me.”

Alana shivers for real now, unavoidably.

“And also to me, I mean,” she says nonsensically but with heart nonetheless, “thank you.”

Alana is charmingly slurred, but Margot has heard enough trickery in her life to know sincerity when it reaches out to touch her.

“You are welcome,” Margot replies simply and without condition from the dark.

Alana can’t really see her, just her outline and maybe the glint of sharp eyes. However she knows and can imagining how she will be leaning as only Margot can; so utterly cool, so incitingly inviting with her hip resting against the front door. Literally stood between Alana and the outside world, the dark. She couldn’t ask for a better view, protector or buffer.

“Margot Verger…” Alana whispers, she herself isn’t sure if it is a question or a statement or maybe just an uncontainable exclamation. Margot answers her anyway, like she is positive she always will.

“Yes Doctor?”

Margot watches with satisfaction as Alana flushes, all high on her cheeks and the bared collarbones where her thin sundress has slipped, one strap fallen absently and the hem riding up and uneven. Alana feels about as far from deserving of any professional moniker right now, drunk and half way to undressed, sprawled on the floor with her fingers tracing the smooth edges of destroyed antique chandelier.

Margot actually thinks Alana probably has never deserved the title more. In her opinion, this is making her feel a million times better than any of the actual therapy she has received before.

Seeming to find her voice somewhere, Alana also locates a train of thought as she props herself up on her elbows. When she finally works out some words, they sound tired, pitched low and sleepy. Margot isn’t offended by the pause or the tiredness; she hears the want in the words because she knows what to listen for. The flattering vulnerability means more than sugar coated words.

“Margot,” Alana starts to repeat, “Margot-” she feels flushed and shaky, possessed, steadying herself on the bannister as she rises to draw closer to Margot’s Cheshire cat grin in the darkness, Alana swaying in the moonlight as she presses in, speaks with a reverent hush.

“Margot," the floor is ice cold under her feet, Margots breath warm on her cheekbone, "take me to bed.”

 

JULY TWENTY FIFTH// SAVANNAH GA // NINETY SIX DEGREES

 

When they sleep that first night the whole night through, woken only by the almost non-existent breeze which taps the fingers of a huge, sprawling tree softly against the bedroom window, it is a welcome sigh of relief. A point of victory for them. Monster House: Ten, Verger-Bloom: One. They flip the pillows to the cool side and throw off the covers and spend a long, lazy morning in bed. Margot weaves the pattern of the ivy darkening the windows against Alana’s long, bare side in a tickling brush of fingertips to skin.

“How did I get so lucky huh?”

Alana laughs, muffled into the mattress and arches her back when Margot puts pressure onto the muscles there. The press of her nimble fingers sparks bright, satisfying pain up Alana’s body and makes her voice liquefy when she tries to speak.

“I can say in hindsight that you had to get supremely unlucky first,” she says sagely, “going through hell keep going and all that.”

“You too.”

Alana turns onto her side when the burn suddenly gets too much for her spine, the seemingly endless residual pain of surgery and trauma fresh and hot even now, so many months later. Margot’s hand falls naturally to rest on her hip instead. As she moves Alana uses a foot hooked around her calf to scoot them together so Margot knows she isn’t being pushed away. They end up lying on their sides, noses almost touching.

“Gli amannti di Valdaro,” Margot whispers.

Alana hates how sad her eyes look, loves how beautiful they are.

“What?”

“The Lovers of Valdaro,” Margot links her arm through Alana’s, puts her other hand on her jawline, fingers tapping against Alana’s throat there. They are pressed so closely, gazes steady and honestly neither has ever felt so close to another than this moment and Alana doesn’t care how corny that sounds, her heart _hurts_ with it.

“The skeletons?”

“Found in precisely this unconventional burial pose don't you know. In their own tomb, together forever and ever,” Margot suppresses a yawn that makes her shiver all over, “this feels like that.”

Margot’s eyes close and it makes her look less sad and more peaceful. In momentary panic, even though she is aware it is entirely irrational, Alana wants to shake her awake, _alive_.

“I don’t want to think about that,” she says, “about death.”

“Not death,” Margot smiles genuinely and shakes her head so their noses rub in a gentle Eskimo kiss, “just forever and ever, I like the sound of that.”

“This isn’t a tomb,” Alana feels desperate, desperate to make Margot understand, make her see. Margot hums flippantly, like they are quarrelling over brands in a superstore.

“It is cool though,” she says, “and dark and peaceful? That is something.”

“It’s _not_ a tomb.”

Alana puts her hand on the back of Margot’s neck and pushes till their foreheads touch. As a Doctor of the mind she knows it isn’t possible to push good thoughts into someone’s head but damn if it wouldn’t make everything easier. Alana sighs and feels the fight leave the bed on her exhale.

“If anything, this place is a cradle, the start of something,” Alana pushes impossibly closer, “A new life for us and not just the end of the old ones, you can feel that can’t you?”

They haven’t spoken yet about the future, what it is exactly they are trying to do here. It isn’t the time now either, not with the both of them enjoying this first real night of sleep, both too hot and too close and just too raw for that conversation.

“I suppose,” Margot says wryly, “we aren’t either of us strangers to resurrection.”

This must be the middle ground on the subject and Alana breathes a soft sigh of relief.

“I heard that The Lovers were really just huddling for warmth. Frozen to death. I don’t think we need worry about that happening in this heatwave.”

Margot shakes her head, which makes Alana’s head move too with how close they are.

“They bled out in each other’s arms actually, or so they say, the cornerstone of all real romantic tragedy.”

“There is nothing romantic about blood loss, trust me.”

“Agreed. But having them with you, in that moment-” Margot treads carefully, runs her thumb in circles against Alana’s ribs.

_It is strange seeing the rain falling directly down, like being in the constant hail of a thousand relentless, shining bullets. The fat droplets are probably making all of her bones chatter but she can’t feel any of them right now. Is she even trying to get up off of the ground? Along with the glittering raindrops, the last of the glass settles around her and it feels like a hundred years pass before Will’s face appears in the sky, his hands fluttering over her and the weight of his coat pushing her down, down and down so she falls clean through the earth. She knows she won’t remember a word spoken between them but she will never forget the second that Will’s hands leave her; the last point of contact which disapears somewhere around her shattered hip and then he is up and turning and she is trying to be brave despite every shard of her broken body pleading with her, don’t let yourself be alone, please, stay with me, don’t_

“I don’t suppose I say these things correctly,” Margot is whispering, “I wasn’t exactly raised in an environment where saying anything encouraging or affectionate or even remotely sane was commonplace,” she grins oddly, “but I hope you understand my meaning because I’m not trying to scare you. Truly.”

“I think we’ve had our fair share of being scared.”

“Being on our toes,” Margot agrees, “is an exhausting way to live. And I never want to do that to you.”

Alana is hit with the realisation like a physical blow.

“Your family’s cruelty is not contagious Margot and you are not going to hurt me,” she says in her firmest voice, “I can use all of my personal and professional evidence that there isn’t an iota of that inside of you.”

“You were there when I murdered my own brother right?”

“Right up beside you with my hand ending his life, and don’t you forget it.”

“How is that not cruelty?”

“I am choosing to file it way as defence. Defence in the interest of protection and love.”

“Impressive. That defence of yours is pretty intense. Intense... and violent.”

“So is protection and love.”

“Smooth, you really know how to sweet talk a girl.”

“This isn’t sweet talk. This is murder talk and semi-therapy, I don’t waste sweet talk on people already in my bed.”

Margot almost blushes, if such a thing was possible for her. She definitely looks embarrassed and maybe a bit turned on and this wasn’t really where they thought this argument was going but isn’t that the thing.

“God,” She kisses Alana lazily, missing her mouth almost entirely which is awkward since they are so close together, “I am so into this, but way too hot to do anything about it.”

“Agreed,” Alana kicks the stray remainder sheet that is sticking to her leg away, every point of contact feels like touching pure heat.

Margot is a forest fire and Alana will never get out of the way in time.

They get up with all the speed and urgency of two skeletons unwinding and rising from their resting place. They agree there are worse places to die, worst ways, than in that bed together. Alana makes Margot promise her a hundred years and she agrees, voice solemn but her eyes laughing brightly.

After separate showers, Margot fixes them tea and puts ice chips into each cup. In careful ritual she arranges the very impressive, gothic teaset with an exacting precision, wishing for and immediately beginning to plan for oranges and fresh mint at her fingertips, perhaps a whole herb garden.

Alana emerges from upstairs and heads for the door with her hair wet and skin cool landing a kiss on Margot’s shoulder as she passes. The door creaks something terrifying and lets what is almost a physical wave of heat into the cool foyer when it opens. Quik as lightning, Alana ducks to grab the paper and immediately slams the door like the sun might set her ablaze.

“Reinforcing our creepy, elusive, vampire status with the neighbours there love?” Margot is amused even as she blows the steam of the surface of her tea and burns her tongue anyway, “ow. Christ.”

“I’d kiss it better,” Alana smiles gamely, “but I wouldn’t want to risk biting you.”

“Oh, promises, promises,” Margot grumbles.

Alana spreads the Tribune over the marble top and taps her nails on it. She looks down with displeasure at the front page. Margot slides a cup across to her and sits down at the breakfast bar, trying to crane her neck to see the paper. This weather seems to make her weary before she is even fully awake, quite the shock to her system being so used to the crisp and biting mornings up north. Alana groans unhappily and puts her chin in her hand.

“Oh no,” Margot gasps flatly with mock horror, “it’s the Sand Gnats isn’t it? They really are gone.”

Alana offers her a longsuffering, amused glance before reading aloud.

“… Maximum legal temperatures hit in classrooms, workplaces and government buildings have moved us into a state of declared heatwave and drought. Local authorities deem it the discretion of the residents themselves to act sensibly and accordingly but the restrictions listed over leaf must be abided first and foremost. Parents should see page 5 or consult the Parents Association for information on school closures. Business owners should see page 6 for reference to the Code of regulation section 3395 Heat Illness Prevention…”

“Did it just get hotter in here?” Margot groans.

“You brought us here remember?” Alana says childishly, licking her thumb to get the newspaper pages unstuck. She prevails, turns the page with a flourish.

“I brought us here out of whimsical sentiment,” Margot says defensively, “I didn’t realise your childhood literary hero lived in the ninth circle of hell.”

“Sixth.”

“Really?”

“Sixth circle -c _ondemed to eternity in flaming tombs-_ I actually think I saw that written on the Welcome to Savannah town sign you know.”

“Just testing you Alana dear, if these unliveable conditions take your ability to be a smartass I am not sure we can survive.”

“Ha ha,” Alana’s eyes scan the page quickly, Margot can see her taking in all the rules, frowning at some but definitely already planning their implementation,

“Goodness,” she folds the newspaper shut and moves to place it in the empty mail sorter.

“Let me guess, more excuses to stay home with the curtains closed and take showers together?”

“That seems to be the gist of it, yes. Disappointed?”

“Heartbroken.”

 

AUGUST THIRD // SAVANNAH GA // NINETY NINE DEGREES

 

The extreme heat is unexplored territory for Alana, who nevertheless rises to the challenges it presents with her usual gusto and adaptability. She can definitely handle this, she has a list and her wits and battery operated fans. The heat is survivable. The dark entombment in the house, however, is bordering on torture.

Margot has lived up until recently as the disgruntled and mistreated princess in the tower, guarded over by a mean, ugly and irritating dragon. She is no stranger to waiting it out, to being trapped, feeling frozen in time, feeling boiled alive. Their days pass pleasantly enough, are made comfortable by their own ingenuity and the ability to be around one another easily. Alana however can't help but feel stir crazy, can’t read enough to fill up the day and seems to suffer the heat with a stubborn need to keep her mind busy. She has never lived anywhere where a coat isn’t a year-round necessity, so job hunting the newspapers in her underwear is definitely a novel experience.

 A few days before, Alana had told Margot about seeing snow outside of her window every day straight for two years as a child. In return, Margot tells her about a year spent in the Mediterranean, the story is horrible but Margot doesn’t seem to notice. Since then Margot has begun to regale Alana with the occasional unhappy story which she drops randomly and dispassionately like she read it in a book someplace and thought it seemed relevant.

Anecdotes and horror stories from somebody else’s life.

She talks about being packed away ‘for education’ in Italy and living with the cruellest nanny who took an instant liking to little Mason and naturally not to Margot. The Nanny would offer Mason a space under her umbrella from where he would spend hours kicking Margot out of the shade into the Mediterranean sun and gleefully squealing about cooking her like bacon.

“We turned sixteen on a business trip to Mexico. My father was too caught up in Mason to realise I was paying attention, but I knew we were going to see a contact who specialised in making steroids, things to make Fathers stock stronger, wilder. I saw women on the way into the complex laying on sofas foaming at the mouth. I saw… other things too, spent my sweet sixteen surrounded by men I could only half understand and wished I couldn’t. I remember father clapping Mason on the shoulder, giving him a wrapped box. It was his own knife, given to Mason and I didn’t get a thing. Except later, with everyone watching, Mason-” Margot weighs her words, jaw tightening, “gave the knife to me. A couple of times in fact.”

Alana wipes at her cheek quickly with the back of her rubber gloved hand, she probably has soap on her face now. She stands at the sink with her back to Margot who is seated at the kitchen table, Margot doesn’t speak for sympathy, she doesn’t want to know that her confessions make Alana cry; make her want to rage, smash things, drag Mason back to answer for everything again. Alana wonders exactly when she stopped being able to listen without emotion; In her work, she used to hear untold horrors and keep it together, but now every piece of Margot’s past makes her feel it all too, feel every knife wound.

“We were too young to be left home alone, Father had that much custodial feeling apparently, so we would travel to all kinds of hot and horrible places. The countries themselves seemed lovely in other circumstance I expect, but Mason said all the travelling and climate change would give us SAD, drive us mad like the pigs in Father’s pen. He said we would try to tear each other apart so I better keep my teeth sharp.”

“Charming,” Alana says evenly, beyond angry.

Alana is trying valiantly to do a weeks’ worth of washing up in one sink full of water, because she is a rule-follower and also, apparently, a masochist. She realises the wonderful irony of her hands twisting and twisting the plate under the water, her knuckles probably white under the gloves as she holds her own breath and pushes down over and over.

Margot makes a dismissive noise of agreement and the rustle of paper indicates her attention has returned to the blueprints spread all over the kitchen table.

Alana puts the thoroughly drowned plate into the drying rack and turns to lean back against the counter, watching Margot quietly. She traces her finger over walls she wants painting and floors she wants stripped. The house is a good project for her.

Despite her initial warnings of manual labour in a heatwave and dehydration statistics, Alana concedes that it is making Margot happy and is therefore enthusiastically encouraged. Margot will pull herself out of bed in the early hours and fix a pot of coffee, she will find a corner to work on and balance a brimming cup on the lid of the toolbox or a tin of paint. Alana finds her in the strangest places, precariously teetering on a busted stepladder and painting a ceiling, on her back half in a cupboard or face half obscured by a dust mask while sand or wood chip goes flying.

Margot enjoys disturbing the dust motes. Having spent her whole first life wanting to take a hammer to every inch of Muskrat Farm she can now take inordinate pleasure in the healthy process of destruction and reconstruction. Every new coat of paint or reshaping of a room is making the house their home all over again.

On days when she misses her horses and the heady pulse of riding and daydreaming of escape, she can refocus her thudding heart into hard work on their home. And then, feeling the recently unused muscles aching after a long day of shoving at furniture is an immensely satisfying feeling.

She collapses usually exhausted and filthy at the end of the day on the sofa next to Alana, who is more often than not buried in a book. She can close her eyes and smell the clean smell of turpentine, her own sweat, the fragrant cup of sweet tea Alana has rested on the floorboards. Welcome fingers will push the hair from sticking to the back of her neck and pinch into the muscles of her shoulder in a way that makes Margot moan loudly, too tired to be restrained.

“Don’t bother showering,” Alana will promise, filthy and business-like without even looking up from her book, her hands working in circles lower and lower, slipping under the plaid to get hands at Margot's waistline...

The blueprint is a huge, sprawling monster.

With careful investigation, it is apparent that the house defies convention entirely; Margot spent the day mapping the layout herself, measuring with bare feet one in front of the other and a pencil tucked behind her ear. Alana had watched the lovely little furrow appear in her brow as she peered downed corridors and slapped post-it note scribbles up on the walls.

After hot hours of this, Margot concluded that the layout was lovely nonsense, a rabbit warren of rooms and thankfully the complete opposite of the gaudy, opulent spaciousness of Muskrat Farm. Trying to correlate her scribbled measurements onto a floorplan made Margot grit her teeth, she mused aloud with equal frustration and adoration that maybe the original architect had just dropped a dozen children’s building blocks into a jumble and called them rooms, interconnected with a serious of passageways and saloon doors.

There a little flights of steps up into rooms which seem to be on the same floor, all of the ceilings are improbably high for the height of the house and there is for some reason both a cellar and a basement. Both of these rooms appear to be on the same level but one is inexplicably colder than the other. There is an occasionally loud bump, bumping from the darker, hotter room which indicates a back-up generator. Needless to say this hot, dark room of odd noises has never been ventured into and is dubbed the basement, the lights don’t work and frankly it creeps them both out.

The cellar however, is so named because this is where they keep all of the wine and the hoarded, non-regulation bottles of water that Alana ordered online the day the drought was declared. The cellar is cool and peaceful and Alana has even added some hurricane jar lights to the space. They strung these up and tossed a lumpy sofa down the stairs to make a perfect little sanctuary. It is a brilliant place to spend un-days in, when they don’t want to be near big windows or talk too much.

Alana, champion of the washing up, leaves the crockery to soak in the mostly-still-hot water and then snaps off her rubber gloves smug as a surgeon. She rounds the table and sits down opposite Margot like they are devising battle plans over a war map.

“What falls under your hammer next then?”

Margot knocks twice on the table over the porch like she is knocking on the front door to the blueprint house.

“Not sure, I did see some nice tiles in an Antique store off Alice Street though.”

“Bathroom or kitchen?”

“Whatever you think when you see them. Both?”

“All right,” Alana plucks a surprisingly fresh apple from the fruit bowl, tosses it in the air, “sounds good. We can go tomorrow?”

“Are you bored?” Margot’s voice is mild, not accusing, characterstically she asks these things as a genuine question and not an argument starter like some people might. She allows Alana the time to answer and she does actually think about it for the first time.

Alana is thankful for the given time and considers, turns the apple while she thinks and digs a pattern of grooves into its flesh. Crecent moons, puncture marks in the fairytale red skin, the wolf howling on the porch, witches fingers scrabbling tapping the window. Boredom? Here, in this gingerbread house of their ownmaking, so safe within it’s walls? Boredom isn’t possible.

“No,” She says, like the whole idea is preposterous, “I am not bored. I mean, this is the longest holiday I have ever taken-“

“This isn’t a holoiday," Margot looks ever so slightly irritated now, just there in the set of her mouth.

“No,” Alana back tracks without back tracking too hard, without apology, “I know, I know it’s just I meant this is the longest I have been without work or income or a plan.”

Margot nods, eyes on the blue print. When she speaks her voice is soft and reasonable, matching and opposing the panic in Alana’s own.

“You worked very hard for your career,” She states simply, “You can’t just let defenestration, a murder and me dragging you halfway around the country to get in the way of that.”

Alana laughs despite herself.

“So what are you suggesting?”

“Well the way I see it, you need a few things. Number one is a plan, sensible really. My lifelong plan of freeing myself from my brother was pretty much the sum of my goals, I didn’t ever imagine what might be past that and never bothered to imagine it for obvious reasons.”

“You thought you might take him down with you.”

“Something dramatically Shakespearean like that I suppose, yes.”

“That isn’t freeing yourself from him Margot.”

“Isn’t it?” Margot looks up finally across the table, her words are dark and deadly but her eyes look softly into Alana’s, “those thoughts are invalid now besides, as we both know that isn’t what happened.”

“None of your thoughts are invalid, ever, I mean that.”

“Sure, and maybe I will start writing the nastiest ones down for you rather than firing them out with no warning. I see your face sometimes. You know I don’t even realise what I am saying sometimes. And I recall promising I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“You don’t,” Alana shifts in her chair, “hurt me. You don’t. Hearing that, being here, it isn’t about me. That is something that is all for you, and it’s what I am here for.”

“And here I thought you were just here for that thing you like when I-”

“Well sure, I might be an outstanding psychiatrist and girlfriend, but I am also human” Alana says dryly, mouth quirked up happy and teasing, “You mentioned a plan, before you started trying to get me to mess up your blue prints by dragging you over this table.”

“We can get to that for sure. Back burner that. But in the grand scheme of things, the way I see it is we have a couple of options.”

“I do love multiple choice.”

“This isn’t multiple choice, none of them is the wrong answer.”

“But then how will I be right?”

“You are always right Alana. Now let me enjoy exercising my right to agency and choice.”

Alana waves a hand graciously for her to continue, and Margot takes a breath like a diver on the edge of the precipice, a short, sharp and confident inhale.

“Well, we could wallpaper ourselves into this house, paint all the windows and doors shut and lie down in our bed. They can find our bones and try to imagine our romantically boring existence locked up here in our own haunted house of a tomb.”

“Next option? As much as my teenage, gothic-novel devouring self is so loving this plan can we aspire to something hopeful please?”

“Option two is us starting a real life here, not going back. Now, I know how you feel about the money-“

“I don’t want us using that bloody money right now. Do you?”

“No, I know, but honestly I don’t think that we can, the lawyers are taking so long, flitting around, sitting on the money and I don’t know what our options are here, if any. But we need income like you said.”

“I can work, we can work.”

“Of course we can but not right away, that won’t happen overnight and we just need to figure this out. What do you want? What do we want? Mason’s wishes were very clear, with the heir and…” she takes a deep breath, “well that is definitely something we can think about later. I’m just saying Alana, we might need to start thinking about _thinking_ about it now. Ok?”

“Ok.”

Margot turns back to the blueprint and starts affixing and scribbling onto post-it notes. Alana feels knocked sideways and a little breathless, off balance with all the wordsin the air that she hadn’t even let herself think about; not going back, grand scheme, the money, the heir… Alana leans forward with her elbows crinkling the paper and reaches to take the pen gently from Margot’s hand.

“You want to have a baby with me,” Alana smiles, as she lets her voice be teasing but can’t hide the breathless wonder rising in her.

“Yes.”

In the end it is that simple, Alana grabs Margot’s wrist and all the fluttering pulse, quick heartbeat excitement she feels is like a burst of birds in the soft spoken, calm of the kitchen.

“For real?” Alana whispers, “For real and not just for surviving?”

“For real,” Margot says matter-of-fact and she uses the hand that Alana isn’t clinging on to and casually presses a yellow square into one of the rooms, “for real, of course, but not until we speak to the lawyers, for sensibleness’ sake.”

Alana finds herself nodding. Margot smooths down the post-it with sure fingertips, it is in the room opposite the big master; the brightest room with the longest windows, a view of the park and the gothic arches in the ceiling that spiral to turret point.

“Also I don’t want this without two more conditions. Firstly, until we are certain this house won’t try to eat a baby. And secondly not until I am satisfied that you are happy and comfortable and occupied, you weren’t made for this life away from people, you need to do good. I mean, more than just the good you do in here with me, that is.”

Alana feels a tear hit her forearm and the surprise that she is crying is secondary to how much she is feeling, how wonderfully calm and invested. Margot slides her hand up Alana’s wrist to brush the two stray tears away, first from her arm and then the one just under her lashes. She whispers over the blueprint like they are really in a war room, strategizing and plotting.

There probably isn’t this much crying in a war room, Alana thinks stupidly, or maybe there is, or should be, if it’s important enough to fight for.

“We need to be smart about this Doctor, I think that’s your department?”

“I'll do my best.”

“Great,” Margot smiles as she leans over the table and kisses Alana hotly on the temple, holding her for a long, long moment as they both thrum with barely concealed happiness and trepidation, “I am going to bed.”

She is gone from the room, leaving Alana alone with the soaking cutlery, the big new map of their intwined life and her own racing thoughts.

Using her uneaten apple to pin down the edge of the blueprint, Alana rounds the table so she can peer down at all the little notes and ideas written with careful scribbles in an unbelievably elegant hand. Spotting the note on the turret room, she reads the words on the sunny yellow square and her heart clumps noisily in her ears.

_The Nursery?_

Alana pulls the cap off the pen with her teeth and scribbles out the question mark. As she turns out the lights and uses her hand on the wall to guide her towards the stairs, towards Margot and rest, she can’t help but feel a surge of pride. She has made her first, and best, contribution to the blueprint, to the plan.


	3. I'm Not Here Looking For Absolution (Because I Found Myself An Old Solution)

 

AUGUST FIFTH // POOLER, GA // ONE HUNDRED DEGREES

 

"I spoke to the lawyers."

Margot has to yell over the surrounding cacophony of noise, leaning in close.

Alana is initially distracted, enjoying the tickle of Margot’s hair on her cheek before the words register. Just then the _wizz bang_ of a firework sparks up and to the right of them like a magenta gunshot and they both wince, then _ahh_ appropriately along with everybody else. Hot little coloured sparks shower down and disintegrate moments from touching their skin.

Alana takes a sip from her lukewarm gin and soda, bites on the straw thoughtfully instead of answering.

Margot presses in tighter against her side, impressive considering how packed the stands are already, the hot and happy crowd squashed together in the stadium.

"Outcome?" Alana asks around her straw, shouts really.

"... Complex," Margot scrunches her nose in embarrassment, "not really a one word answer. But, we needn’t talk about it right now."

She says it like she very much does want to talk about it right now, right here on date night in the middle of a deafeningly noisy, busy speedway track.

"But you’re thinking about it right now," Alana yells as softly as she can.

With another cracking loud display of noise and light the race begins. Margot follows the crowds one gaze immediately to the track but Alana keeps her eyes on Margot for a moment. She enjoys watching without being watched, always has. She grins at the funny angle of the red Rock Auto cap on Margot's head, the way her hair is spilling out in tangled curls underneath, the anticipation in her profile and her slightly open mouth. Her face is coolly excited by the whole spectacle but she seems to regard it all with a little underlying tension held in her jaw. Alana takes another long slurp of gin and quashes the urge to kiss her there against the high, soft part of her neck. A delighted yell from the crowd has Alana back in the moment -tipsy lusting spell over- and she whips her head forwards too.               

 A dirt bike in the middle field of the track is revving up at the base of a ramp. Apparently one method of Saturday night entertainment is watching some fool launch themselves through six flaming hoops.

Somebody behind them says, _“Holy Mother.”_

Margot finds Alana’s hand and holds tight, when she looks up Margot is narrowing her eyes with a conspiratorial, laughing expression. She winks.

"I've watched men do stupid, grandiosely ridiculous things all my life," she says directly into Alana's ear, "but it is usually just for their own amusement. Not a paying crowd."

Alana laughs and the crowd joins in, heckling and watching in delight as a clown makes its way onto the field, summersaulting to the top of the ramp and waving a huge polka dot starter flag. The countdown begins just as Margot inhales, says “So-” and is promptly cut off by the shouting crowd.

Alana waits. She is a master of anticipation, has spent many, many moments waiting for a sentence or a single word. She has sat, patiently frozen and steady opposite a reluctant or unsure person just trying to find the words. She would watch with an almost physical _need_ to get what is hurting out of them. If you compiled all that time together, she thinks, you would have a long silent movie of trust, frustration and anticipation, hours of Alana with a pen poised, face open, sat very still in an array of pencil skirts. The offices and the clothes and the patients change but the feeling is consistent. The unpainful yet anticipatory, confident _waiting_.

She can feel it now in the way the crowd is literally counting down for her, the timer seemingly urging Margot to finish her thought, to explain and bare herself. It is there in the way her hand squeezes Alana's fingers and her eyes are downcast, totally ignoring the spectacle before them. The crowd gets to a drunken "five!" and Margot ducks her head, the peak of her cap knocking Alana's temple. Despite the noise, Alana is attuned to the sharp intake of breath Margot makes just before she speaks and, like all those times before she thinks, _there you are_.

"It's here."

Alana pulls back sharply to look into Margot's eyes, happy but shot through with wary trepidation.

The noisy man behind them says again, _“Holy fucking Mother!”_ Alana agrees with him silently.

The stadium hushes down for the jump and when they both look up the bike is on the downward ramp and it's all over. Alana turns to Margot, 'do you want to get out of here?' she says without words.

It never ceases to amaze Alana the way a crowd will part before Margot. It was more understandable before, when she was in full heiress mode and a thousand dollar suit, her eyes on fire and everybody else's eyes on her. But now, in her peaked cap and jeans, she doesn't even need to shove to have people moving aside. In fact, one beefy trucker nearly sits down in his own hotdog in his haste to make way. Alana follows in her path -because she would anyway- but also because their hands are still very much entwined. She spares a sympathetic glance for the hotdog guy. Margot _is_ wearing very nice jeans.

The Tesla is in a badly lit field serving as makeshift parking. The heat of the night is almost a physical thing to wade through and the few stadium pitch lights in the vicinity hum with electricity and the beat of wings, darting gnats and moths. The earth underfoot is desert dry from the heat, and while there is not a blade of grass or a leaf in sight, everything is lit with a greenish, yellow haze from the moon. Will o’ the wisps at the edge of sight, stray fireworks cracking the air, fireflies gathering at the treeline.

_We have entered so it seems zones of magic, zones of dreams._

Margot's eyes look especially green as she pushes her hair from where it is sticking to her face so she can drop her head to rummage in her bag for the keys. Alana pulls her own hair away from the back of her neck, feeling the sweat there and praying for a breeze or anything to ease the sickening pressure in the air.

It is a short drove home from Oglethorpe speedway, hardly worth firing up the AC but they do it anyway. The streets are so quiet with everybody either at the race still or home hiding from the heat. The eerie ghost town quality of a heatwave slammed Savannah is still amazing to Alana, who is, at heart, a city girl and not used to seeing streets with all the shutters thrown wide but not a soul in sight.

 

_“It’s like a dream.”_

_“Margot, you haven’t got any shoes on.”_

_“Oh hush. You don’t need shoes in a dream.”_

_“Tell me that when you step on a hypodermic needle.”_

_“Well, somebody isn’t very much fun tonight. Long day at the office of cold baths and novel reading dear?”_

_“I’m just tired. And hot. And I don’t understand why we are roaming the streets at midnight.”_

_“I wanted to see if anybody actually existed in this place, or if all those twitching curtains were actually just the heat driving me finally mad.”_

_“I don’t think anybody is going to be hanging around at this time of night, nobody we really want to meet anyway.”_

_“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t really permitted out of the house much.”_

_“So this is what, remaking your childhood? Is that why we had to go out the window and not the door?”_

_“You know I spent all day varnishing those doors.”_

_“They look good, smell awful. Wow, would you look at that moon.”_

_“Exquisite. So what do you want to do? Anything, we can get away with anything.”_

_“Oh really?”_

_“Tried and tested baby. Hey, let’s break into Flannery’s house and fuck on her writing desk.”_

_“Good god woman.”_

_“Just a thought. Do you find it interesting, Doctor, that that gets your moral sensibilities objecting harder than when I suggested murder?”_

_“Not at this point, not really. Can we go home now?”_

_“Sure, nobody is coming out to play anyway. Shame.”_

_“I’m sure once the heat breaks you will be forever moaning at the kids to get off of your lawn and about the traffic noise at night.”_

_“Probably. Hey, you know I actually found a nice desk in the attic, a real sturdy looking, Napoleonic piece. I will show you if-”_

_“If you say ‘race you to that street light’ oh for-”_

The car swings sharply into the drive and they mark the total count of people seen outside of the stadium tonight as zero. Maybe they are the only real people alive in town? The final survivors through and through.

"Tea?" Margot asks as they head in through the side door, the one where the shutter used to creak something nightmarish and still does even after they oiled it.

It is a carefree, innocuous question that Margot knows Alana can't vocalise an answer to. She jerks her head in some direction anyway, mind racing, and it must have been an affirmative nod because Margot moves to the stove and kettle and starts pottering around. They haven't even turned a light on in the house yet. The huge moon has followed them home and is laying bright and helpful over the kitchen table and the flagstone floor.

"Where?" Alana says, trying and failing to sound just as blasé, “where is it?”

Margot gently clicks the gas on and it takes a long moment for the flame to catch. The gas fumes should make Alana nervous in a house this old, but to her the smell will ways be home cooking and mugs of perfect, scalding tea.

"Atlanta. It's a good clinic, the best," Margot replies, turning to lean against the counter.

Alana is silently pleased that the table and the moonlight and some space is between them. This is good. Alana famously struggles to take rational action with Margot within arms reach sometimes.

"You didn't say anything," Alana genuinely isn't angry, just curious.

"No," Margot starts toeing off her boots, her face turned down, "I thought perhaps this was something you might need me to do."

Alana is overcome. It's true, she isn't sure she could have made the call herself. Despite her compulsive need for control, there are some parts of herself she needs to volunteer the reigns to somebody else occasionally.

Margot has very capable hands. "Thank you," she rounds the huge table and sits on the edge of it, feet swinging absently. Her legs are looking very tanned in the yellowing dusk of the moon. "For making the call? Or for knowing what you need?"

Alana toes off her shoes.

"For everything."

"I haven't given you everything Alana,” Margot drops a teaspoon noisily in the deep butler sink, “not yet."

There is nothing to say to that and Alana is too whacked out to reply anyway. She has an early meeting with a property surveyor about plumbing options in a historically listed building. Just the thought of her when her alarm is set for has her yawning silently. She is so caught off guard by the racking quake of sleepiness that she misses Margot moving to stand in front of her Hands smooth up her bare thighs, the outside of her legs, and not for the first time Alana wonders idly and privately just how Margot learnt such a soft touch?

Alana twines their fingers together like tangled stems and pulls their hands as one to the hem of her own shirt. Margot smoothly slides Alana's shirt, hair only catching a little in the process and making them both laugh in frustration. Alana feels every bit of Margot’s gaze on her bare skin. She shivers even against the astounding heat. Heat which, seems old news to them now they have developed a stubborn, tolerant indifference to it.

She shudders again, head to toe.

“Was that for me?” Margot whispers against her neck, ghosting her open mouth down. Clavical, breastbone, ribs. All the solid parts that keep Alana upright. All the parts that are trembling in the wake of those lips, she shakes undone another fraction and yes, yes it is all for Margot. Every gasp and goosebump is a thank you for the soft hands, the attention, the touch of a kiss on the jut of Alana’s hipbone.

Alana is being ruined slowly, torturously in the way she likes best as Margot hums and fumbles with the sole, annoying button in her path. She lands a simple, absent kiss low on Alana’s belly. The sensation is enough to tickle, god, Alana is so keyed up for it and her laugh morphs into a quiet ‘please’ turned to gasping.

Margot stands up and Alana uses the proximity as an opportunity to pounce. She gets Margot by the nape of her neck, fingers twining and tugging at her hair. She knocks the stupid, adorable hat off her head to the floor and brings their lips together.

Their noses bump hard and Alana instinctively moves her hand around Margot’s neck to hold her jaw, both hands cradling her face and tilting her head back. She kisses deeply, hotly, aware that a lot of Margot’s curls are tangled up and tugging in Alana’s watch chain and they haven’t breathed for almost a minute.

The kiss tastes like gin and a little of the spicy cheese from the nacho box at Oglethorpe.

Margot acquiesces beautifully to Alana’s attention, going down soft and surrendering for once and letting herself be guided. Alana realises the motive here when the button finally goes on her shorts, which are some truly awful, small denim things Margot dared her to wear to the rally. As fast as she surrendered Margot is pulling back sharply, both hands low on Alana’s hips to keep her pinned down to the table.

Margot is dishevelled, hair mussed all over and yet somehow seems entirely put together, fully clothed and breathing evenly. She is a wholly unfair kind of woman. Alana, taking quick stock of herself, realises she might actually be panting, not to mention is sat half naked with her legs spread on the kitchen table.

She mentally adds sanitiser to the grocery list.

Her head is spinning a little.

“Do you-“

Margot puts a single finger up, just a breath away from Alana’s mouth and so she snaps it shut automatically. When she lowers her hand, her finger catches against Alana’s bottom lip gently, it lingers like a kiss. And then in one easy, flithy move Margot has that hand down the front of the dumb daisy dukes and Alana doesn’t even have time to shout.

She bucks automatically and laughs, loving Margot’s tender but brusque, business-like approach. The hand on her hips is a bite of five nails in the skin and Alana can’t catch herself, the words come out.

“Is this you giving me everything them?”

“Oh darling,” Margot moves her hand against her slowly with mean but steady rocks of the heel of her hand, “that wasn’t an innuendo, you know the depths of human connection better than most people. This isn’t _everything_.”

“It’s enough for now,” almost, Alana laughs, arching up into the touch, “at least it could be.”

With her body arching off the table like it is almost, very nearly enough. Nearly perfect. But as Alana shifts her hips to get Margot right where she wants her, the pressure disappears altogether.

Alana slumps back, breathless and pouting in a very grown up way.

“What is this then?” she hooks her ankles around the back of Margot’s thighs in an attempt to reel her back again. 

“This is proving a point.”

“Go on.”

Margot touches her again with little warning, hard and quick and downright playing unfair. Alana leans forward, slumping her shoulders just enough to gasp against Margot’s lips.

“I know exactly what you need,” Margot steadies her unconsciously thrusting hips with a sharp grip, “and what you need is to stay and let me take care of it.”

Margot’s touch moves between a slow drag and a sweet encouraging motion that has Alana digging crescents into the table top in an effort to remain still. Margot starts talking then; telling Alana everything is going to be all right, that she is beautiful, wonderful to love, that she will be a perfect mother. Alana must be gasping out some responsive, affirmative noise because the world goes silent and still whenever Margot leans in to kiss her with a quick closed mouth.

She was doing so well maintaining a cool, unphased demeanour but the little kisses feel like a crumbling of that façade, an automatic reaction. It is pity, probably. Pity at the sight of Alana in her underwear writhing helplessly on Margot’s hand.

Margot kisses her again harder but just on the edge of the mouth, tongue against the seam of her lips enough to make Alana gasp. It is quiet then, almost silent if it wasn’t for the oncoming high roar. It is a sound Alana matches with what she can feel building somewhere low and tight behind her sternum, her hips, at the points of her curled toes dangling just off the floor. 

Alana might be a scientist but unarguably, Margot is made of magic. She quickly switches up the pace and has two fingers right where they live and Alana is this close to reshattering her spine in an effort not to move when all of a sudden, the high pitch screaming gets too loud to be what Alana assumed was an oncoming orgasm and yet-

“ _Damn_ ,” Margot says and steps away completely.

Alana hangs literally, emotionally and bodily on the edge.

“Don’t-” her mouth says weakly.

But Margot is wiping her hands on a dish cloth and dumping it into the sink and with just that motion, mind blowing sex starts to resemble a gynaecological exam. Alana draws her legs up on the table and tries not to feel too murderous. She watches dazedly as Margot turns to the screaming kettle and takes it off the heat then sets about pouring two cups of sweet tea, as if she hadn’t just been on the glorious verge of giving Alana religion through her fingertips.

Margot picks up the fine, steaming porcelain cups and leaves the room.

Alana watches with a burnt out, frustrated brain as Margot steps carefully on each stair. She doesn’t look back; her face is set in concentration, obviously mindful of not spilling the tea.

Torn between finishing the job herself and having a good cry in the kitchen, maybe both, Alana settles on planning to set the kettle on fire instead when suddenly Margot is back, dragging her off of the table and wrapping skinny arms around her waist.

“Come on you hot, sleepy thing,” Margot rasps with wicked laughter dancing about her kiss bitten lips, she carefully tugs the shorts back up Alana’s thighs so she can walk without being hobbled, “I want you in our bed. Now.”

 

AUGUST SEVENTH // SAVANNAH, GA // ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT DEGREES

 

Alana comes home from the store with a pint of milk, loaf of bread, bottle of whisky and an electric kettle. She illegally rinses their cups –quickly- while it boils and makes them both tea. The back door is wide open with the insect screen drawn so she carries the tray out into garden. She sets the tray down on a stump with care and then tips Margot from the hammock she was dozing in and follows her down.

They make love half in the shade on the hot dead lawn and eventually, when they are both equally drowsy and sated they crawl back into the cool shadow of the oak tree. Margot’s sundress is covered in dirt, her neck bruised and their calves and feet feel sunburnt after a while.

Alana lets Margot drink both cups of cold tea and they enjoy the mutual smugness in the air until the heat exhaustion kicks in.

“I’m going to drive to Atlanta this morning,” Alana pulls her hair up onto her head and holds the bun there, trying to imagine a breeze on her neck.

Margot smiles, there is a dimple there just under her cheekbone that Alana has never seen before. She looks young, open, honest.

“Brilliant.”

“Would you like to come?” Alana’s mouth twitches, “and don’t-“

Margot is laughing, shoulders shaking against the tree she is dropped up against, sundress fully unbuttoned and head tipped back. She sobers quickly and regards Alana over her heart shaped sunglasses with deathly seriousness.

“I filled up the tank yesterday,” Margot squeezes Alana’s calf in a gesture of such easy, domestic comfort, “you got this?”

“Yeah,” Alana closes her eyes, “I got this.”

 

AUGUST SEVENTH // ATLANTA, GA // ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE DEGREES

 

Being a Doctor means Alana has a scientist heart. She is used to paring down the emotional, the upsetting and the life changing to a string of genetics, code, brain activity. It is the only way a forensic psychologist can look at a mauled human body and provide it any justice, rather than just a break down.

This being said, she is amazed at how emotionless and, well, clinical the clinic is. They talk for an hour and Alana is given stacks of reading material about ‘the procedure’. And _, boy,_ she thinks by her fifth signature, _if anything can take the beauty and excitement out of making a baby… it’s paperwork mountain._

“A difficult question for you now, procedural and hard to quantify perhaps; If you could tell me in your own words why do you want this, really?” The Doctor pauses with pen to paper, “it is important to bear in mind that this isn’t a test, there is no correct answer.”

Alana watches the blob of ink grow as she tries to scramble her thoughts together.

“We-“ she starts, because isn’t that the most important word here? She isn’t doing this alone, it isn’t something _she_ is doing at all, not entirely. But how to explain that?

“We need to produce a male heir,” she says, deflective but outwardly deadpan, “you know, for the fortune.”

The Doctor pauses some more, the ink blot is the seize of a pea, then he tips his head and guffaws one big, deep belly laugh.

“Oh,” he wipes his eyes, “that’s funny, a real good one. Love it.”

Alana smiles, genuinely amused.

“I’m joking,” she kind of lies.

“What a shame, I’ve never had my work effect lines of succession before.”

“That you know of.”

“Alright, ok, and they say we don’t have a sense of humour right Doc!” He spin his chair suddenly, jarringly, with game face on, “but really now, because it’s nearly lunch time. Answer?”

Alana shuffles on the plastic chair. Why did she wear these professional looking flared slacks? She is melting.

“I love her. I just-“ she shrugs, “it’s like you said, hard to quantify. But I know, I just know, already that I love them too.”

She is worried the Doctor might laugh again, but he turns back to the forms on the desk silently.

“Correct answer.”

 

AUGUST SEVENTH // McCORMICK COUNTY, SC // ONE HUNDRED DEGREES

 

They don’t keep secrets. Not long term hurtful ones anyway, but Alana has a place she goes that Margot doesn’t.

She knows about it, obviously, but she never goes there, respecting Alana’s space and need. It is the equivalent of abasement with a pool table or a shed with a false floor full of porn, Alana supposes. Only much more gratifying.

The driveway to the farm is a couple of miles long and even in the late light is dappled with sun. Alana doesn’t drive the Tesla often but she enjoys these chances to tear down a country road and really opening it up. Even so, she reduces speed when the stables are visible and keeps her eyes peeled for any flying, darting, furry objects.

It is evening and too late to be visiting really, which means that everybody is probably inside in the converted barn. Sure enough, the front door opening spills homely yellow light onto the decking. A half a dozen dogs follow suit, tumbling out into the ground in a badly rehearsed ensemble entrance. Alana hurries out of the car and flings her arms wide to receive the fluffy incoming missiles.

Applesauce barrels into her chest and Alana grins even through the twinge it sends jolting up her back.

The farm is half an hour over the border, somewhere vaguely outside a gas station and a little town called Plum Branch. Technically Mason paid for the converted barn and the stables, in that his money paid the wages of the owner. Cecilio took the offer Margot gave him, wise and reasonable man that he is. He gave up killing for a living and took his last pay check to South Carolina. Leaving him the horses seemed like a natural step, Cecilio used to guide tourist riders up the paths in Molise before he became an unsmiling henchman for the Vergers. The dogs he seems secretly happy to keep around too, although he will never admit it.

Cecilio appears in the doorway, bedecked in overalls and resting on an honest-to-god pitchfork in the light of the barn.

Alana raises a hand out of Applesauce’s silky coat in greeting. She is always happy to see a trustworthy face, the unsmiling protector of their little flock.

“Buonasera,” she calls.

Cecilio grunts and spins the pitchfork, but he nods toward Alana, who is steadily being buried alive under a pile of dogs.

“Doesn’t Cecilio ever cuddle you?” Alana ruffles between Winston’s ears, “you are so needy. Come here.”

“I tell you segnora,” Cecilio calls from the deck, “Le dico che e’ troppo tardi per passeggiate a”

“You told who?” Alana disentangles and follows where his hand is pointing.

Somebody, a very distinct somebody, is barrelling past the treeline. Alana’s breath catches. Margot moves like something else, something entirely otherworldly on horseback. Even from this distance, the control and gracefulness is clear enough as she cuts a path down the hillside.

“She says she will aspetta.. she will _wait_ for il dottore but first,” Cecilio shrugs, “she rides.”

“Sounds fair,” Alana smiles, squinting out into the trees, hand raised to shield the low light from her eyes.

There it is, with all the weight of a barrelling dog to the chest, she feels that first moment all over again. The memory warms her, and she looks down at all the dogs snapping and playing in the yard fondly.

“Cecilio,” she asks, “do you have anything to drink?”

Cecilio, of course, has plenty to drink. The farm isn’t really a working site, although the sign back on Highway 28 claims _Applesauce Farm_ manufactures peaches or peanuts or some such fabrication. It is really just a place where they can keep the animals and Cecilio can keep himself -and his hush money- hidden.

“For you,” he ushers Alana through the door and wipes his pretty much clean hands on his dirtier overalls, he lifts a black box from a bureau, “il migliore!”

From within the box and the folds of tissue paper he produces a bottle of craft beer. The bottle itself is beautiful, hunters green glass, a long neck and far too, excruciatingly familiar. Alana blanches.

“Where did you get that?” she whispers.

Cecilio, thankfully, doesn’t twist off the bottle top. He shrugs infinitesimally though.

“A gift,” he stumbles around for the word, “a… payment.”

The dogs noisily announce themselves in the room with a bird flight sound of tails wagging against the furniture. Alana might also be imagining hoof beats.

“I thought you didn’t take payments anymore Cecilio.”

“Si, you pay for the dogs,” he smiles in a heartfelt way, “but you don’t pay for the dogs to eat _organic_ food and for Cecilio to drink good liquor!”

Alana nods; the knot of tension undoing in her chest one loop at a time as the picture falls into place.

“Was this payment,” she gesticulates the box, resisting the urge to glance around the room, as though somebody might just step out of the shadows with that old familiar face, “hand delivered?”

“Only first time, happy reunion,” from the porch, Buster barks in eerie agreement, “and then mail. This one,” Cecilio turns back to the bureau and a larger, squarer box, “for example, comes by post.”

He hands it to Alana, it is heavy.

“And it comes, I think, for you.”

Alana reads the tag. She reads it again.

“Do you want return address? I have somewhere-”

“No,” Alana says too quickly, “God no thank you.”

Alana breathes out shaky, in too fast. _Don’t pass out woman,_ she chides herself.

Cecilio,” she whispers, “do you have anything that isn’t beer, please?”

She vaguely registers him shrugging, saying, “whiskey, came with the barn,” as she gently eases the lid off of the box like it contains a bomb.

The box is tissue paper upon tissue paper, fluttering, wing-like folds of the stuff. Alana’s hands finally reach something cold and solid.

_A promise is a promise, Alana_

She brings herself to look down at what she is cradling in her hands.

The thing it the box, it’s a head.

*

Margot left not long after Alana did that morning, not liking the sad quiet her absence left in the garden. Also, honestly, at one hundred and twenty plus degrees, Margot will use any excuse to get in an air conditioned vehicle.

The ride up to the lake wasn’t exactly, consciously planned. But after a nice, silent lunch with Cecilio -which reminded her of old times except better because he didn’t have a gun on her and, bonus, no Mason- she took to pacing the stables while she waited. Alana would come, she knew.

“I have everything you need,” Cecilio, holding up a saddle, had said from behind her as she smoothed her gloved hand between Euphrasie’s eyes 

“I’ve missed you,” Margot whispered to her, looking right into her big, sad, wise face.

Returning four hours later to the yard with her heartbeat in her throat and thighs aching, Margot eases off the poor horse and leads her to a post and water. They had stopped at the top of a high incline to rest and watch the sunset over Strom Thurmond in the distance. The pink sky reflected in the lake was like magic, and then Margot spotted the unmistakeable car way off in the farm yard, and that was an even better sight.

“You’re drinking whiskey without me?” she announces herself by swimming through dogs to get to the bottle on the porch railing, she pours just one finger into a very fancy tumbler and tips it back hard against the adrenaline in her throat.

Wincing at the burn a little, she turns properly to where Alana and Cecilio are sitting comfortably in relaxed silence. Cecilio is looking at the sky, hat tipped back. Alana, with her legs curled up under her is staring at the object on the end of her wicker deck chair 

It’s an odd thing. Margot mistakes it for a sculpture at first glance in the dim light but, as she draws closer to the chair it is apparent that it is a phrenology bust, one of those heavy old fashioned ones. The china is a little cracked in places, but beautifully shone. Butterflies in reds and oranges decorate the head like they are exploding thoughts caught in a moment.

Margot puts her hands on Alana’s shoulders in an easy silent greeting, as though they had absolutely planned to meet up to drink whiskey on an Italian fugitive’s hideaway farm in Nowheresville, South Carolina.

“Do you know what this means?” Alana looks up smiling, unrestrained. She is almost _smirking_ actually.

“Cecilio branched out his decorating tastes from framed stars and stripes and buffalo horns?”

“Ha ha,” Cecilio snatches the bottle from her hand and she almost considers trying to take down a dangerous, pitchfork wielding ex-hitman for a second before she remembers that she is in fact the designated driver and also values her life.

Margot looks to Alana for some explanation, but the handwriting on the gift tag jumps out at her and she frowns and picks it up.

“The last time I saw this hand was in a courtroom,” she waves the tag, “is this to do with serial murder again, love?”

Applesauce flops in the yard a few feet away with a pathetic, needy noise. Alana is in the dirt beside her in a few seconds flat, hands running through her coat. Margot tries to remember the noise to store away for reference.

“I’ll tell you in the car,” Alana looks up with a grin and she is breathtaking, Margot is floored, reminded of the morning they got the stuck painted shutters finally free of the parlour window and suddenly: light everywhere. Alana looks like a new woman, or maybe, Margot considers, this is what the original Alana looked like once? All the fight in her resting for a moment.

“It’s ok,” Margot turns to hand Cecilio an obscene wad of cash and he nods once and immediately skulks away whistling, back into the stables.

“Hey!” Margot calls after him, “see to Euphrasie’s front left shoe. And buy some better whiskey with that won’t you?”

The whistling gets stubbornly louder.

“He doesn’t need your whiskey money Margot, he has a supplier of craft beer.”

“Who the hell around here makes craft beer?” Margot says angrily.

“Round here? Not a soul,” Alana beams delightedly, “thank god.”

Margot rolls her eyes at Cecilio’s retreating back and then, turning to see Alana basically on her hands and knees playing with the dogs, whole heartedly repeats the action.

“Your deal with the devil stories can wait Alana, those are so last year-”

“I didn’t deal with the devil. I bested him,” she looks thoughtful, “or perhaps we drew?”

“Well whatever the final score may be, I want to hear how the clinic was instead. Are you ok? I thought of nothing else the whole bus ride here.”

“You took a bus?”

“No,” Margot scrunches her nose, “please, a bus. Hysterical. I took a cab, charged it to the firm under necessary expenses and everything.”

“Huh, you’re a brat,” Alana says without vigour, getting distracted by Applesauce nuzzling into the crook of her elbow, paws folded over in her lap.

“And you are ruining a perfectly good jacket down there and, _Jesus_ is my car dusty,” Margot is squinting across the yard, she sighs, “and I bet we need to stop for gas.”

“Guilty on all counts,” Applesauce lunges in with a wet kiss to Alana’s cheek and she grins, burying her face in the soft fur between her ears.

Margot stalks off across the yard. When she is close enough to blip the car unlocked she whistles once fiercely through her teeth. Alana looks up to see her backlit against the violently pink sky, hip cocked with the box under her arm, keys spinning round one finger. She hasn’t taken her riding gloves off by the looks of it.

“Come on girls,” Margot opens the car door and bows convincingly, “let’s go home.”

  

AUGUST NINETEENTH // SAVANNAH, GA // ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN DEGREES

 

Margot is spending a lot of time in the Nursery slash tower room. She potters around secretively, buys wall fixtures and white paint and carrying boxes upstairs, grunting under the weight but refusing help. Alana has been happy that Margot has been occupied because it gives her time to read through the paperwork and leaflets from the clinic, make  appointments and place calls about ads in the jobs section of the Gazette. She also has an addictive novel with a cracked spine under her arm at most times, a particularly fantastical bit of nonsense.

Around noon, sun burning holes in everthying and keeping Alana confined to the shade of the back porch lest she burst into flames, Margot yells her name out of the window. Alana and Applesauce are sitting on a cardigan on the mildew spotted decking, Applesauce just rolls over and pants when Alana shoves her gently aside. When she makes it upstairs, Margot appears on the landing and is quick to snap the door shut tight behind her, keeping her back to it. Her expression has the neutral blankness of someone hiding something. Alana takes in the the state of her, Margot has paint on her neck and fingers and something in her hands.

“Take this,” she says.

It’s a tablet. Margot clicks on it with her least painted finger and the screen comes to light. A tinny version of Rockabye Baby plays and a whole catalogue of cribs and Moses baskets springs up on the page.

“Choose.”

Alana raises her eyebrows.

“I want you to choose it, I want,” Margot looks up at her between her lashes, _shyly_ , “I want there to be some things in here that are you and things in here that are me.”

Alana kisses her, tablet held limply and pressed between them, the screen blissfully cold against her bare arm. Margot laughs into the kiss, a happy, long suffering chuckle. Her back hits the door and Alana brings her free hand up to brace against it.

“No,” Margot says, tilting her head and pushing off the door, “you can’t use that as a diversion to get in here. Surprise remember?”

“The last time somebody surprised me I broke my back.”

“Well just trust me then. I am quite fond of your spine and plan to keep it intact,” she shoves the tablet under Alana’s nose again, “choose.”

 

AUGUST TWENTYSIXTH // SAVANNAH, GA // ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN DEGREES

 

At about one thousand degrees and everybody’s breaking point, the weather finally gives in.

The heat surges unbearably but the dry inferno turns wet at last, a mighty storm rolls in off of the sea, to great applause from the sky. Alana has been watching out of the front windows, tea in hand. It hasn’t taken long for the far off claps to turn into shuddering blasts above the house.

Alana sighs and steps away from the window when the first flash of fork lightning is visible.

Margot isn’t home.

In the worst possible timing, she had to go to a meeting at a Richmond solicitors office to sign some legal documents. She left yesterday and insisted it was easier to stop over in a motel than try to do the whole stretch. Despite Alana’s best attempts to dissuade her Margot was pretty insistent. Alana had ensnared her and caged her in when Margot had been trying to find the car keys, held her close even though it was really too hot to touch.

_“They can’t post the damn papers?” Alana complains._

_Margot laughs and tries not too hard to remove herself from Alana’s arms._

_“I think they want to look me in the eye, besides what happened to nobody learns our address?”_

_“Let me come.”_

_“Just let me go, it’s all very boring signing and T-crossing legal nonsense. Home soon,” she twisted in Alana’s grip and kisses her goodbye, wriggling out of her clutches to the triumphant jangle of keys, she turns back, lays another kiss on Alana’s temple, “I promise.”_

Applesauce, who has had a low and persistent whine in her throat for about an hour now, is glued to Alana’s side, her belly close to the ground. They both jump when the landline phone starts ringing.

“Calm down,” she tells Applesauce and, mainly, herself, “just a storm.”

She pads in stocking feet down the flagstones in the passage to the hall but when she reaches the landline it has cut out mid ring, Alana’s hand still hovers over the receiver.

Her cell quickly takes its place, the ringtone extra shrill and tinny against the sound of the rain.

“Hey,” Margot’s voice, far away and crackly.

“Margot, god this-”

There is a huge crackle of interference on the line and Margot gets even more inaudible.

“I’m coming back to you- traffic- just I need you to look-”

“I want you to come home. The storm it-”

“-in a doorway or the tub just to be-”

“Margot?”

“-safe-”

The sound cuts out.

“-at the news, look-”

The line beeps loudly and clicks softly and then Alana is left with nothing but the echo of her own voice coming back to her.

“Margot?” she says hopelessly, as irrational as a child shouting into the dark.

The brand new TV in the sitting room is dying, the turned picture flicker blue. It seems to be packing up along with everything else useful. It takes Alana three lengths of pacing the hall to get the signal on her cell to cooperate enough to load the Eastern news. The little screen struggles but eventually pulls up a bulletin report. The storms in the south have made it onto the list. Georgia’s record breaking heatwave has finally broken in a violent way, power lines down, a flood on the coast. Alana keeps scrolling, heart in her throat when she passes the death toll from a pile up before she reads further. She feels an awful sense of relief when she realise it is about 400 miles too north to be of any consequence to her. Thumb moving frantically now, she doesn’t know what she is looking for until she sees it.

She nearly drops the phone.

HAVE DE GRACE HISTORIC HOME LEVELLED IN BLAZE

And there, the little thumbnail enlarging to show Muskrat Farm, every one of its windows spitting fire, the roof on the east wing collapsed, one turret crumbled onto that lawn. The stables are little burning matchsticks.

_Just let me go, it’s all very boring signing and t crossing legal nonsense. Home soon, she had kissed her then all sweet and lingering, I promise._

_I promise._

_What you need is to stay and let me take care of it._

_Just let me go_

Alana, clever Alana Bloom PHD, MD puts her phone carefully on the breakfast bar and gets it. She _sees_ it.

_Margot with a trunk full of gasoline heading to the home that never was, drenching every single memory and dropping the match. Wishing she could burn the severe, wrought iron fence she leans on to watch, just for one careless moment. Satisfaction and fire are sparring in her green eyes, watching as the Verger crest ignites on the building’s façade. She wishes she could hang around, wants to take a handful of ash home as a souvenir, a spoil of war. But she changes her mind, disappears into the dark. She will never touch this place, this family, this legacy ever again. And it will never touch her._

Alana feels a calmness contracting the chaos outside the house, she shushes Applesauce’s eternal low whine and makes her way upstairs to the nursery.

She isn’t used to feeling left out, her brand of personality never let that be a possibility, but she feels it now. That absurd sting of hurt that Margot didn’t include her in this revenge, her last revenge. Alana understands catharsis, has prescribed it many a time, but it doesn’t stop the panic that she hadn’t known. She hadn’t _realised_.

She stops outside the nursery, the room she was forbidden from accessing all these days. Was she wrong to be happy to give Margot some space and a job to occupy all the time Alana was spending at the clinic and in the garden reading?

What does she expect to find, a room full of cat burglar masks and dynamite? Members of the Southern Baptist Church gagged and held hostage? Alana has had the rare, not-pleasure of actually being inside a murder house, has seen the basement of horrors hidden behind a nice herb box and some good décor. She knows what can lurk on the other side of seemingly respectable doors.

With no fanfare, the door swings open on the first and only try, it isn’t even locked.

The room is hexagonal, with two walls of almost floor to ceiling sash windows. It is dim now, with the only lighting being the occasional burst of sheet lighting. It illuminates the made up Moses basket, a dresser and a rocking chair by the window, wing back and covered in folded soft looking muslins. There are stacked brown boxes in one corner with the contents stamped on the side. She can make out ‘Rocking Horse, Dappled Mare’ and ‘Pirate Ship’ among them.

The room itself is surprisingly plain, the walls are a clean, clinical white and although there are nails on the wall only one painting hangs off centre like an afterthought. It looks like a half finished drawing of two soft outlines of figures, women maybe with long hair, one in blues and one in yellows and grey. The background paper is an off cream and honestly it is ugly, Alana thinks, in an overly simple, washed out sort of way. She is so thrown by the random choice: ‘pale stick figure women standing in reeds’ is not exactly the choice she would’ve gone with in a baby’s nursery. But Margot always has been the one with the style.

The room is beautiful, Alana the careful birds hand stencilled onto the painted windowsill and thinks about Margot torching a building to the ground. Such a delicate touch from such violent hands. Alana knows the feeling.

Applesauce clicks in after her eventually and sits heavily on the floorboards at her feet. She feels the wetness of her nose against her hand and pats absently. Looking out at the storm from here the city looks like a toy village has been hosed down and shaken up. The sky out towards the sea is a riot of black and purple, a rough bruise on the horizon. A last shot peal of thunder quakes the house. One of the houses across the streets has fared badly, an oak tree has almost uprooted and a flailing branch has caught itself in the attic’s roof, tiles are scattered like broken teeth in the street.

The light flicks on overhead like lightning has struck their house too. Alana doesn’t react, it isn’t a surprise. She has been waiting since the headlights pulled in the drive and watched Margot dash through the whipping rain and leaves, front door slamming.

“The power is back on,” Margot whispers, “obviously.”

Alana doesn’t turn. She can’t stop looking across at the branches stabbing through the windows, like a tree is growing from the inside of the house. The old, bleeding heart part of her thinks they should probably go over and offer help, but something has crashed into this home too, not a physical something but a weight in the walls and in Alana’s lungs.

“I feel better,” Margot wants her to say it’s all right, to condone this, but she sounds defiantly unashamed, “finally, I feel better.”

Alana felt angry when she saw the headline, she realises, angry that she wasn’t enough. Wasn’t the thing that could make Margot feel better, give her the freedom that in turn Margot had given her easily with this house and her comfort.

She shoves this nasty feeling down, swallows her wounded pride in the face of Margot’s wellbeing, let’s herself feel the equal pleasure in the image of Muskrat Farm burning.

“You should,” she says to the window, “it’s all gone now.”

“No. I’ve got the money.”

Alana looks away from the window finally. Margot is stood leaning one hand casually on the white Moses basket. The one she let Alana choose with the swallow pattern edged into the soft lace.

“ _’My father wanted me to do art therapy, not forensic psychology, but I couldn’t find the right tools in paint and paper that I could in grief and violence,’_ that’s what you said,” Margot quotes her with a steady voice, horribly matter of fact, “you don’t know very much about art do you Alana?”

Alana gawps at her for a beat and then, whiplash fast she turns to the sole piece of decoration in the room, that odd off-beige expanse of canvas and the figures she can only half make out from this angle.

“It doesn’t go with the paint,” Alana says dumbly, brain stumbling to keep up.

“You’re right. But I wasn’t sure what goes with a couple of million dollars worth of art,” Margot almost sounds defensive, “so I winged it. It’s a Dali.”

“Oh my God,” she can’t stop saying it, “oh my God.”

Margot smiles, pleased with herself, and nudges the mobile over the basket. Birds and stars soar and spin like the leaves being whipped up in flurries outside.

_I want there to be some things in here that are you and things in here that are me._

“The lawyers told me we had one more week, just seven days until the fund transferred out of the Verger holdings. Regardless of our personal wants and plans I couldn’t fight it legally or biologically in that time frame. So instead I pulled the carpet out from underneath them.”

“Margot,” Alana breathes, “you didn’t pull the carpet out you _set it on fire_ ,” she sounds impressed even though she tries not to.

“Poetic, no?”

Alana can’t help it, she laughs, laughs till she is crying. Pent up tears rolling down her cheeks and the laughter dying in her throat. She is too often at war with being good and being happy but relief is a welcome feeling.

Margot just watches, but she moves closer minutely across the room, arms folded and hair dripping wet. She must be shivering from the way her jaw is tight and her clothes are soaked through to the skin.

“We could have had it all anyway, eventually” Alana frowns and unconsciously settles her hand low against her stomach, right where that little flutter of want and hope lives, “eventually. Or not. Whichever.”

“I wanted to prove that that wasn’t what this was about.”

“You don’t need to prove things to me,” Alana sighs heavily even though she knows it makes Margot flinch sometimes, “that isn’t a good basis for a relationship.”

“Oh please, it might not be the basis of the relationship. But I don’t think it hurts? Tell me you weren’t happy when you saw it burning.”

“Happy that grand prison was a fucking ash heap? Margot,” she groans, “come on, you know I was pleased.”

Margot scoffs but smiles kindly.

“ _Pleased_.”

“Ecstatic.”

“That’s more like it.”

“It’s a horrible fucking painting,” Alana grumbles.

Margot tilts her head and purses her lips like she does when Alana suggests they stay in bed reading all day, fondly judgemental, approving but not altogether agreeing.

“I rather like it actually. I spent a whole afternoon at the SCAD Museum of Art when you thought I was having my hair done. I liked the flecks of gold, I thought it was all-” she shrugs, as one does when critiquing ones fortune in art form, “ _soft_ ,” she points, “she’s got your hair.”

They stand silent but for the dying storm outside and the pad of Applesauce making her way to wind around Margot’s legs, the steady drip of rain falling from her hair to the floor. There are so many sounds in the silence, ironically, but Alana is still struck mute.

“This is the first time I’ve been cold since we got here,” Margot’s pathetic little laugh turns to a shudder.

“Come here,” Alana says. She is furious at her, takes her into her arms without a second thought.

They sink down to the floor and Applesauce worms her way between and over their laps like an obedient blanket. Margot pets her soft fur thoughtfully as they both look up at the painting.

“You stole from the Southern Baptist Church. In their own back yard,” Alana says, trying to keep the awe out of her voice. Margot doesn’t need any more encouragement.

“They might see it like that,” Margot agrees, she is sniffing now but feels warmer to the touch at least, “we’ve already shaken off the serial killer, I thought the enemy list tacked up on the fridge looked empty? Anyway I stole from myself really, _technically_. I sorted out the insurance on the farm so we don’t get a cent from the fire in damages, I didn’t want to give them any more reason to try to track us down. But everything else, the business, my trust and the shares, everything was liquidated, blended and pulverised into a new investment,” she nods at the painting.

“Do me a favour and please don’t ever tell me how much that stick figure drawing is worth.”

Margot laughs brightly.

“Deal. Well, it’s enough to put a kid through college at least, or _me_ through college if I want,” Margot lists off on her fingers, “a car, a humane meat industry business start-up or a whole farm full of peacocks, a nice yacht or a new home anywhere we want, a new sperm donor if you want. Let’s just say it is at least enough to pay to have someone come and fix that recurring squeaking fucking shutter on the side door.”

“A quiet door? Well, in that case,” Alana wraps her arms around Margot and Applesauce both, squeezes until the dog gets fed up and scampers away downstairs, “I guess it can stay, we might get lots of similar artwork to put up around it someday?”

“Of the macaroni, finger painting style?”

“Exactly. Priceless.”

Margot shoves and arranges them so she is tucked into the vee of Alana’s legs, pulls her arms around her until she is fully cocooned in. She puts her head back on Alana’s shoulder and her hair is wet and her clothes are soaking through to Alana’s skin. Alana grumbles internally about the likelihood of them both getting struck down with a cold.

They listen to the dying storm outside and the sporadic drip of some probable leak in the attic until Alana’s legs go numb underneath them. She regards the painting, tracing her eyes around the soft lines and all the while laying absent kisses to the top of Margot’s head where she smells like smoke.

Eventually, she imagines, the scent of burning will cling to them both and maybe they will still smell it in the morning when they brush past each other in the kitchen, commenting casually on the cool weather. Or the scent might linger in the bedsheets when they inevitably tumble into them later.

Alana imagines placing a solid, healthy weight in the soft basket under the spinning birds and stars someday and maybe a sleepy little hand will grab at her finger and she will smell it even then; a reminder of all the things they had to burn down to build this paradise. Worth it, _worth it._

Alana takes a lung bursting breath in, wraps around and around Margot’s shivering, damp, murderous, arsonist body. She couldn’t push her away if she tried.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The painting is actually an etching called Return, Return, Shulamite by Salvador Dali and does in fact hang at the SCADMOA which is a seven minute drive from the house. It is a very beautiful thing but I got a bit creative with the value of it. Speaking of which, I hope the girls spend the money on a teleportation machine because they drive around far too much to suit my storytelling needs...


End file.
